Journal of the Short Story in EnglishLes Cahiers de la nouvelle 

73 | Autumn 2019Double Issue: Special Section and VariaSpecial Section: Region, Environment, and Community in AmericanLiterary Short Forms (Guest Editor: Ina Bergmann)

Gérald Préher, Xavier Le Brun and Michelle Ryan-Sautour (dir.)

Electronic versionURL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/2654ISSN: 1969-6108

PublisherPresses universitaires de Rennes

Printed versionDate of publication: 1 December 2019ISBN: 978-2-7535-8286-6ISSN: 0294-04442

Electronic referenceGérald Préher, Xavier Le Brun and Michelle Ryan-Sautour (dir.), Journal of the Short Story in English, 73 | Autumn 2019, “Double Issue: Special Section and Varia” [Online], Online since 01 December 2021,connection on 08 April 2022. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/2654

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UNIVERSITÉ D’ANGERS

BELMONT UNIVERSITY

-----------------------------------Journal of the Short Story in English

Les cahiers de la nouvelle--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------FOUNDING EDITORBen Forkner

EDITORGérald Préhergerald.preher@univ-angers.fr

ASSOCIATE EDITORXavier Le Brunxavier.lebrun@univ-angers.fr

DIRECTOR OF PUBLICATIONLinda Collinge-Germain

CONSULTING EDITOR Emmanuel Vernadakis

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTFrançois Hugonnier

NORTH AMERICAN EDITORSJohn Paine, Belmont Universityjohn.paine@belmont.edu

John Lowe, University of Georgiajlowe@uga.edu

DIGITAL EDITORXavier Lachazette

HONORARY EDITORIAL BOARDLisa Alther, Louis de Bernières, A.S. Byatt, Elizabeth Cox, Suzanne Ferguson, Ben Forkner, Mavis Gallant, Allan Gurganus, Liliane Louvel, Jill McCorkle, Alistair MacLeod, Bobbie Ann Mason, Charles May, Madeline McGahern, Frédéric Regard, Olive Senior, Elizabeth Spencer†, Tobias Wolff.

EDITORIAL CONSULTANTSRédouane Abouddahab (Le Mans Université), Jochen Achilles (University of Würzburg), Michael Basseler (University of Giessen), Ina Bergman (University of Würzburg), Catherine Bernard (Université de Paris), Anne Besnault-Levita (Université de Rouen), Corinne Bigot (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès), Kasia Boddy (University of Cambridge), Deborah Bridle (Université côte d’azur), Bertrand Cardin (Université de Caen Normandie), Philip Coleman (University of Dublin), Gavin Cologne-Brookes (Bath Spa University), Ailsa Cox (Edge Hill University), Valérie Croisille (Université de Limoges), Elke D’hoker (Université de Louvain), Susan V. Donaldson (College of William and Mary), Noreen Doody (St. Patrick’s College, Dublin), Lucy Durneen (ICE, University of Cambridge), Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès (Le Mans Université), Jean-Michel Ganteau (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III), Teresa Gibert (Facultad de Filologia, UNED–Madrid), Gaïd Girard (Université de Bretagne-Occidentale), Peter Gibian (McGill University), Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère (Université de Lausanne), Adrian Hunter (University of Stirling), Vanessa Joosen (Universiteit Antwerpen), Anna Kerchy (University of Szeged), Elisabeth Lamothe (Le Mans Université), Richard Lee (State University of New York), Georges Letissier (Université de Nantes), Paule Lévy (Université de Versailles), Liliane Louvel (Université de Poitiers), Christine Lorre (Université

Sorbonne Nouvelle), Robert Luscher (University of Nebraska at Kearney), Paul March-Russell (University of Kent), Victoria Margree (University of Brighton), Sylvia Mieszkowski (Universität Wien), Amélie Moisy (Université Paris Est Créteil), Jean-Yves Pellegrin (Sorbonne Université), Christine Reynier (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III), Floriane Reviron-Piégay (Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne), Virginia Ricard (Université de Bordeaux III), Jorge Sacido-Romero (University of Santiago de Compostela), Julie Sauvage (Université de Montpellier III), Catherine Seltzer (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Frédérique Spill (Université de Picardie Jules Verne), Sandrine Sorlin (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III), Theoharis C. Theoharis (Harvard University), Virginia Tiger (Rutgers University), Laura Torres (Universidad Complutense Madrid), Tanya Tromble (Aix-Marseille Université), Héliane Ventura (Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès), Jean Viviès (Aix-Marseille Université), Amy Wells (Université de Caen Normandie).

BOOK REVIEWS EDITORKarima Thomas karima.thomas@univ-angers.fr

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTAurélie Reuillon aurelie.reuillon@univ-angers.fr

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INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS

SEND BY E-MAIL, PREPARED FOR BLIND REVIEW, PROPERLY FORMATTED

The Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) is published semi-annually in December and June by the University Press of Rennes (France), under the auspices of the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Patrimoines en Lettres et Langues (CIRPaLL), the Department of English Language and Literature, the Service Commun de Documentation (SCD) and the Presses de l’Université de Rennes.

The JSSE will publish articles on short stories and novellas in the form of essays (not exceeding 48,000 signs) and notes (not exceeding 12,000 signs).

Electronic submission is encouraged. Attach the file, in Microsoft Word format, to an e-mail addressed to gerald.preher@univ-angers.fr (Editor) and xavier.lebrun@univ-angers.fr (Associate Editor), or to painestover@gmail.com (North American Editor). Please also include the address of JSSE secretary Aurélie Reuillon in your e-mail (aurelie.reuillon@univ-angers.fr).

Please include the following in the body of the e-mail: title of the paper, a 150-word abstract, in English (and French if possible), a short contributor’s note, your name, current e-mail and postal addresses, and your institutional affiliation (if it isn’t obvious from your postal address).

We prefer submissions be sent as a Word document, as .doc or .docx. If you must submit a paper manuscript, please send only one copy to Gérald Préher, CIRPaLL/M. R. G. T., 5 bis bd Lavoisier, 49045 Angers cedex 01, France, or to John Paine, English Department, Belmont University, 1900 Belmont Boulevard, Nashville, TN 37212-3757, North American Editor. The manuscript will not be returned. Before your article can be sent out for review, you will be requested to send an electronic file.

It is understood that manuscripts submitted to the JSSE for consideration have not been published previously, in part or in whole, and are not simultaneously under consideration for publication elsewhere.

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Manuscripts chosen for publication should conform to the footnote style of The MLA Style Manual. All pages must be numbered. Please use the formatting style of the most recent version of MLA available to you.

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Authors transfer copyright to University of Rennes Press by executing a contract written for this purpose. This enables us to register each individual contribution, and the issue as a whole, with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France Copyright Office, which in turn provides for remedies in the event of copyright infringement that would not be available if the work were not so registered.

In transferring the work to Rennes University Press, the author does not give up all rights. The Rennes University Press grants the contributor the right, upon request, to republish the work in revised or unrevised form in a book written or edited by the author provided that, in the judgment of the JSSE editors, the proposed use of the work is not in direct competition with the JSSE. Each copy containing our material that is reproduced or distributed must bear the following copyright notice:

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JOURNAL OF THE

SHORT STORY IN ENGLISH

Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle

Special issue:Region, Environment, and Community

in American Literary Short Forms

Ina Bergmann (guest editor)

General Section

No73 autumn 2019

Presses Universitaires de Rennes

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Gérald Préher, Xavier Le Brun and Michelle Ryan-Sautour 13Foreword

PART ONERegion, Environment, and Community

in American Literary Short Forms

Ina Bergmann (guest editor)

Ina Bergmann 21Introduction: Region, Environment, and Community in American Literary Short Forms

Carmen Birkle 37The Empire Plays Back: Of Music, Magic, and Migration in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Foreigner”

Christa Buschendorf 67Violence in the South: Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Sheriff’s Children”

Rüdiger Kunow 83The White Man’s Medical Burden: U.S. Colonialism and Disease Ecologies in Jack London’s Hawai’ian Stories

Erik Redling 97The Making of Lists: Zora Neale Hurston’s Literary Experiments with Glossaries of Southern Rural and Northern Urban African American Terms and Expressions

Nassim Winnie Balestrini 121Anthropogenic Climate Change Condensed: Creating Community in Very Short Plays

Jochen Achilles 135American Literary Short Forms and their Negotiations of the Local and the Global: A Response

PART TWOGeneral Section

Ryan David Furlong 155A “Secular” Covenant: Mosaic Covenantal Theology and the Jewish Working-Class in Abraham Cahan’s “A Ghetto Wedding”

Sharon Michelle Babb 171“At ‘Home’ in Panama”: Space and Spatial Politics in the Short Stories of Eric Walrond and Carlos “Cubena” Guillermo Wilson

Yuhui Bao and Ian Dennis 193Marriages, Mirrors and “Equivocal Contrasts” in Stories by Eileen Chang and Alice Munro

Stephen Bernstein 205Love and Discipline in Alice Munro’s “Amundsen”

Hollie Adams 221Dad Must Do What Dad Must Do: White Masculinity and the American Dream in George Saunders’s Short Fiction

Simon Workman 241There Are Darker Kingdoms: Mapping Modernity in Kevin Barry’s Short Fiction

Beverly Lyon Clark 261Texting a Spinoff: Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s Hybrid “Little Women”

Karima Thomas 281Adolescent Sexuality: Between Discourses of Risk and Resistance

PART THREEShort Stories

Sarah Whitehead 303“La Famille”: An Unpublished Short Story in French by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton“La Famille” (French version) 309“La Famille” (English translation) 323

Lisa Alther 337“The Golden Tower”

PART FOURBook Reviews

Jorge Sacido-Romero 345Michael Basseler, An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America (Bielefeld, Transcript, 2019)

Ailsa Cox 351Chris Mourant, Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

Contributors’ Notes 355

GENERAL FOREWORD

This issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English is a double-volume featuring a special and a general section. The articles included in the special section, “Region, Environment, and Community in American Literary Short Forms,” were selected by our colleague Ina Bergmann. They were meant, like the rest of this issue in fact, to honor the work and career of Jochen Achilles, who has actively promoted short story criticism and the short story as a genre—as the bibliography appended to Bergmann’s introduction amply demonstrates—and whose implication in the ENSFR (European Network for Short Fiction Research) proved both momentous and lasting. Jochen has been a key member of the ENSFR steering committee since its creation in 2014 and has played a pivotal role in expanding the network and coordinating its activities with other international organizations dedicated to short story research. This opening section, which includes six contributions, shows that region as a concept inextricably relates to both environment and community and may often be approached in broader discussions about climate and the protection of nature—writers that include Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez or Rick Bass come to mind. Because American literary short forms have commonly explored questions of nature, place, and belonging, the opposition between city and civilization, on the one hand, and the countryside or the wilderness on the other, has necessarily been a central concern since the publication of classics such as Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819/1820), Lydia Maria Child’s “The Church in the Wilderness” (1828), George Washington Cable’s “Jean-Ah Poquelin” (1875), or Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” (1893). The contributors either scrutinize classics (by Sarah Orne Jewett and Charles W. Chestnutt) or lesser known stories from famous authors (Jack London, Zora Neale Hurston); one of the essays analyzes a different form of short fiction,

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very short plays, while Jochen Achilles presents us with a response to the previous contributions together with possible and invaluable directions for further exploration.

The general section features eight articles and covers a wide range of authors and themes, some echoing the special section with their focus on particular places and atmospheres. Ryan David Furlong in “A ‘Secular’ Covenant: Mosaic Covenantal Theology and the Jewish Working-Class in Abraham Cahan’s ‘A Ghetto Wedding’” focuses on the last story in Cahan’s 1898 collection The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto. Furlong contends that even if scholars of Cahan’s fiction have been interested in the way Cahan depicts Jewish marriage, “A Ghetto Wedding” and its Jewish covenantal theology has not received much attention. According to Furlong, a Mosaic covenant marriage unites the characters (Nathan and Goldy) of Cahan’s story to their religious and cultural past, framing their pursuit of an expensive wedding under fin de siècle capitalism. The ideological covenant with U.S. capitalism which is hinted at here neither secures economic freedom nor social liberation as the newlyweds’ tragic fate illustrates.

In “At ‘home’ in Panama”: Space and Spatial Politics in the Short Stories of Eric Walrond and Carlos ‘Cubena’ Guillermo Wilson,” Sharon Michelle Babb looks at the representation of black West Indians in post-construction Panama through selected stories by Eric Walrond and Carlos “Cubena” Guillermo Wilson. In their works, both authors dramatize the plight of West Indians who migrated to Panama and settled there after the opening of the canal. Starting out with the ambiguous nature of the word “home” for migrants and their descendants within a host country that is not always hospitable, Babb goes on to show that migrants are assigned particular locations within Panamanian society—an assessment which leads her to explore the politics of space delineated in Walrond and Wilson’s stories. This comparative reading uncovers responses found in both authors’ work that can be attributed not only to their shared Panamanian connections but also to the differences in style and, more broadly, to generational concerns. Both writers create narrative voices that refuse to be silenced and depict the violence and dire poverty attending the characters in the stories.

Yuhui Bao and Ian Dennis also present a comparative study in “Marriages, Mirrors and ‘Equivocal Contrasts’ in Stories by Eileen Chang and Alice Munro.” Their contribution analyzes Eileen Chang’s “Love in a Fallen City” (1943) and Alice Munro’s “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001), stories that share an unusual marriage plot. Bao and Dennis argue that both stories make extended use of mirror imagery, offering insights into Girardian mimetic desire. Chang and Munro also thwart or redirect what William Flesch has called “comeuppance,” especially the comeuppance that realism delivers to romantic desire. Ultimately, both their stories seem to endorse Chang’s notion of “equivocal contrast” as the operative principle of

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effective fiction. As Bao and Dennis explain, “[t]he equivocal contrast . . . is not simply between cause and effect, but between the legendary and the ordinary, between those who create fictions for themselves, or are the creations of the fictions of others.”

Also interested in Alice Munro, Stephen Bernstein in “Love and Discipline in Alice Munro’s ‘Amundsen,’” notes that previous criticism has tended to treat “Amundsen” (from Munro’s 2012 Dear Life collection) as a love narrative formally organized by traditional archetypes. Taking a different stand, Bernstein approaches the story through its geographical and historical specifics, locating it not only within the Ontario of the 1940s, but also within the history of tuberculosis treatment and its attendant institutions. Through a careful analysis of the story’s texture, Bernstein convincingly argues that “Amundsen” should also be read as the history of a trauma, which leaves its narrator hollow, detached, and unable to learn from bitter experience.

Hollie Adams’s “Dad Must Do What Dad Must Do: White Masculinity and the American Dream in George Saunders’s Short Fiction,” argues that Saunders’s concern with white masculinity is a central, though overlooked, component of his satirical project. Using various theories about manhood, masculinity and Americanness, Adams relates Saunders’s critique of the American dream to his constructions of traditional masculinity observing that, for him, that dream speaks to men who identify as white. In his fiction, Saunders calls attention to the ramifications facing a society that still believes in the promise of such mythos: he demonstrates that because some men feel that their manhood is being called into question, they are convinced of the need to reassert their masculinity in the form of physical violence—a violence that is mirrored in the very stories Adams has selected.

Simon Workman then takes us to Ireland in “There Are Darker Kingdoms: Mapping Modernity in Kevin Barry’s Short Fiction.” He focuses on Barry’s two collections There are Little Kingdoms (2007) and Dark Lies the Island (2011) “as exemplary of the agility and elasticity that the short story genre has displayed in responding to Ireland’s changing socio-economic dispensation in recent decades”—considerations that echo Bernard Cardin’s introductory comments to JSSE 63. Barry’s fiction exploits, as Workman demonstrates, the formal opportunities afforded by the short story form to explore the complex causes and contexts of modernization in Ireland while also reflecting upon modernity in a wide array of its possible manifestations and meanings. For Barry, this often means intermixing what Workman analyzes as a naturalist aesthetic with an interest in the myths and folkloric traditions of Ireland. Resorting to the fantastic and tapping into Celtic legends as readily as he engages into postmodern textual strategies, Barry is able to call into question “the neoliberal consensus that emerged during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger experiment” while also acknowledging “the greater plurality of identity and cultural expression that have emerged in the new millennium.”

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In “Texting a Spinoff: Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s Hybrid ‘Little Women,’” Beverly Lyon Clark offers us a stimulating reading of Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s “Little Women” (2014), a narrative which is not only an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic story but also a parody, a spinoff, and a short story. Clark shows that any of the aforementioned categories can be called into question, making Mallory’s work effectively enact hybridity as it is comprised of a series of text messages, which are reminiscent of the dialogues of drama, and as it queries the relationship between intimacy and distance while also leading us to reflect upon the nature of thingness.

Karima Thomas, in the last contribution of this section, “Adolescent Sexuality: Between Discourses of Risk and Resistance,” takes a look at Michael Cart’s edited collection Sex and Love (2003). Following Michel Foucault’s definition of sexuality as a discourse that produces and manages sexuality, Thomas analyses the narrative strategies brought into play to represent discourses around sexuality. Such discourses reveal a cultural imaginary that conceives of sexuality as both enticing and dangerous. The short stories that have been selected underline this dual aspect though they depict adolescents who question it. The inherent liminality of the short story appears as conducive to the representation of such moments of questioning for the narrative and epistemological economy of the genre makes it possible to inscribe a suspension of conclusion that reflects an adolescent’s condition of psychological liminality.

This double issue also features a newly discovered story by Edith Wharton, “La Famille,” which is presented here in its original French version and in an English translation. Sarah Whitehead discovered the text in the Edith Wharton Collection (Yale Collection of American Literature) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. We are grateful she thought of JSSE to make the story available to short story lovers and specialists. Readers will also be pleased to find a new story by American writer Lisa Alther, “The Golden Tower,” with comments by the author on the origin of this funny little charm. In JSSE 67, Alther commented that, to her, writing is a means to sort out the real: “writers [are] not just writing to tell a story and to entertain themselves or to entertain us. They [are] using fiction as a way to try to make sense of the world around them.” For that reason, she goes on to explain that “since there was so much in the world around me I didn’t understand I thought I would give it a try.” The story included here is another illustration of Alther’s search for meaning in the sometimes chaotic world we live in and it will certainly entertain its readers.

We are happy to include the reviews of two important studies: Michael Basseler’s An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America (by Jorge Sacido-Romero) and Chris Mourant’s Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture (Ailsa Cox). Readers of JSSE will rediscover Basseler’s article on Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (JSSE 64) in a whole new context that provides new food for thoughts.

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The editorial board would like to thank all the contributors and all the readers for their submissions and continuous support. We are especially thankful to Aurélie Reuillon for her useful and much-appreciated assistance.

Gérald Préher Lille Catholic University, JSSE Editor

Xavier Le Brun University of Angers, JSSE Associate Editor

Michelle Ryan-Sautour University of Angers, ENSFR Director

PART ONE

REGION, ENVIRONMENT, AND COMMUNITY IN AMERICAN LITERARY SHORT FORMS

INA BERGMANN (GUEST EDITOR)

INTRODUCTION

REGION, ENVIRONMENT, AND COMMUNITY IN AMERICAN LITERARY SHORT FORMS

Region

A region is at the same time a geographic area distinguished by similar features and a cultural space with social, economic, and ecological implications (Fresonke; Zagarell, “Region”). Literary regionalism had its starting point in the late nineteenth century, when writers connected their specific region’s character to its nature, people, and history (Baym). “New England” is generally seen “as the source of regionalist writing, Sarah Orne Jewett as the paradigmatic regional writer, and her [The] Country of the Pointed Firs [1896] as the defining work of American literary regionalism” (Baym 303). Regarding its relevance in a global community, nineteenth-century literary regionalism has been reassessed (Fetterley and Pryse; P. Joseph), increasingly through the lens of Critical Regionalism (Benesch; Lösch, Paul, and Zwingenberger), a concept defined by Kenneth Frampton in “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” (1983). Moreover, a surge of memoirs (Daum), such as J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016), set in economically depleted regions, has highlighted a nexus between provincialism, poverty, and social crises, between region and class. As a concept, region is intimately connected to environment and community.

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enviRonment

The term environment indexes contested terrains located at the intersections of political, social, cultural, and ecological economies on the one hand, and, on the other hand, it refers to the place of nature in human history (Alston; Philippon). Nature is often read as a privileged site of American national identity and it is a vital topic in American literature (Knobloch). Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) is understood as the beginning of nature writing, as Lawrence Buell convincingly points out in The Ecological Imagination (1996). Ecocriticism, which evolved from a regional movement of scholars of Western American literature into an interdisciplinary field central to American Studies (Gersdorf and Maier 9), explores how the relationship between humans and the environment is portrayed in cultural products (Cheryl Glotfelty qtd. in Garrard 3). In terms of a literary ecology, texts from American literary history are reexamined and contemporary short stories and novels are identified as ecofiction (Weltzien 81).

Community

Community is at once a sociological and a cultural term with different conceptualizations. It describes a unified body of individuals, a social condition, or society at large (Black; M. Joseph). Carrying mainly “positive connotations” such “as a sense of belonging, understanding, caring, cooperation, [and] equality,” the term is often “deployed to mobilize support . . . for a variety of causes” (M. Joseph 53). Although heavily contested, the venerable ideals of community, sociability, and the social compact have been part of the cultural imprint of American society since colonial times (Slauter). A body of literature that features community in this way can be discussed as narratives of community, a concept most persuasively introduced by Sandra A. Zagarell in “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre” (1988). Narratives of community display some allegiance to regional, rural, or working-class ways of life that are not emphatically individualistic. Again, it is Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs which is regarded as the archetypal source, but contemporary (ethnic or minority) short story cycles also often fit this concept (Davis; Harde; Kennedy; Nagel, Contemporary).

ShoRt FoRmS

The short story is the most American of literary art forms and as such holds a seminal place in the study of American literature. Although recent studies have shown that hundreds of examples of short fiction appeared in

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America in colonial times (Scheiding and Seidl), Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) is commonly considered as the first American short story (Bendixen 4). From its beginnings, the short story was concerned with nation building, the creation of a national literature, and with questions of American identity. After two centuries, the prevalence of the short story as one of the most popular genres is sometimes questioned, for example by Stephen King’s lament “What Ails the Short Story?” (2007). However, in “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story” (2010), Michael Chabon projects a swift recovery and revitalization. Likewise, a host of recent critical studies of the genre, such as Martin Scofield’s The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (2006), Alfred Bendixen and James Nagel’s A Companion to the American Short Story (2010), Kasia Boddy’s The American Short Story since 1950 (2010), and James Nagel’s The American Short Story Handbook (2015), as well as Michael Basseler and Ansgar Nünning’s A History of the American Short Story: Genres – Classics – Model Interpretations (2011) and Oliver Scheiding and Erik Redling’s Handbook of the American Short Story (forthcoming), suggest re- rather than degeneration. Yet, short forms in American literature encompass not only the short story and short story cycles, but also sketches, essays, novellas, short novels, poems, glossaries and short and microdramas or one-act plays.

Region, enviRonment, and Community in ShoRt FoRmS

Regionalism and the practices of ecology emerged simultaneously in response to various upheavals of modernity and have since interacted (Mazel 129). Following in the footsteps of the Chicago school of ecology, which promoted a view of nature rooted in cooperation and community (Mitman), a growing body of scholarship argues that the natural environment is a critical component of community well-being and a stimulus for collaborative action (Elmendorf). Jewett’s exemplary text connects issues of region, environment, and community with episodic structures and the short form. American short fiction, especially story cycles, frequently negotiates issues of nature, place, and belonging. Furthermore, the topic of this special section is of obvious pertinence on a broader scale in an age of standstill or even regression in climate and nature protection, growing divide between rich and poor, city and country, rising nationalism, democracy-threatening lack of sense of community, and increasingly selfish individualism.

The contributions to this special section mainly provide critical (re)readings of regional and/or environmentally significant short texts. They likewise examine, to varying degrees, the dichotomies of nation and region, of individualism and community, and of the exploitation of natural resources and attempts at nature preservation. They also reflect on the short form as a

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medium for the representation of the linked foci of region, environment, and community. In “The Empire Plays Back: Of Music, Magic, and Migration in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘The Foreigner,’” Carmen Birkle discusses the depiction of the confrontation, rejection, and ultimately recognition of a Jamaican outsider within a New England community. Christa Buschendorf’s “Violence in the South: Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘The Sheriff’s Children’” highlights the representation of the social consequences of slavery in a small Southern community. Rüdiger Kunow traces the colonialist dialectics between expansion and exposure, identifying a new biopolitics of location in “The White Man’s Medical Burden: US Colonialism and Disease Ecologies in Jack London’s Hawai’ian Stories.” Erik Redling offers an analysis of the creation and function of Zora Neale Hurston’s glossaries of regional dialect and community language in his “The Making of Lists: Zora Neale Hurston’s Literary Experiments with Glossaries of Southern Rural and Northern Urban African American Terms and Expressions.” In “Anthropogenic Climate Change Condensed: Creating Community in Very Short Plays,” Nassim Winnie Balestrini shows how microdramas employ strategies to dramatize spatially rooted environmental conditions in a manner that emphasizes the necessity of community effort. Finally, Jochen Achilles applies his pertinent expertise to map out the field and reply to his colleagues’ findings in “American Literary Short Forms and Their Negotiations of the Local and the Global: A Response.”

WüRzbuRg ameRiCan StudieS “then” and “noW”

The aforementioned contributions come out of a symposium on “Region and the Short Form in American Literature” held at the University of Würzburg on July 26 and 27, 2018 in honor of Jochen Achilles, the former chair of American Studies at the University of Würzburg. In the tabula gratulatoria for Achilles’s seventieth birthday, various distinguished colleagues stress his extraordinarily wide range of areas of expertise in three disciplines, English, Irish, and American Studies. Those articles, with their focus on American Studies, can therefore only highlight a small part of his achievements in research and teaching. “Region,” “environment,” “community,” and “short forms” serve as terms and concepts indicative of some of Achilles’s areas of research which inspired the topic of this special section.

Achilles first concentrated on the American short story in a 1982 essay on “Donald Barthelme’s Aesthetic of Inversion: Caligari’s Come-Back as Caligari’s Leave-Taking.” This early work was, over the course of the years, followed by numerous publications on the American short story covering the whole historical ark from the beginnings of the genre in the nineteenth century until today and including “Besieged Sleepy Hollows in Transatlantic Perspective: Identity Construction and Contestation in Washington Irving’s

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The Sketch Book” (1999) or “Transnational Perspectives in Simon J. Ortiz’s Short Fiction” (2015). Further work focused, for example, on American short fiction by Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Hamlin Garland, Flannery O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson, John Barth, Sandra Cisneros, and Donald Ray Pollock. In 2015, Achilles co-edited a volume on the short story, Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing, which covers a wide range of anglophone short writing.

Environment and nature have also been prominent foci of Achilles’s research. In 1990, he published “Die Paradiesvorstellung von der Versöhnung des Menschen mit der Natur: Literaturgeschichtliche Betrachtungen zu einem Aspekt des amerikanischen Traumes,” a critical discussion of the representation of nature experiences in American literature. Publications in the fields of environmental and animal studies followed, such as “Edgar Allan Poe’s Dreamscapes and the Transcendentalist View of Nature” (1995), “Monkey Business in Intercultural and Intertextual Perspective: Species- and Ethnos-Orientation in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea,’ and Spofford’s ‘Circumstance’” (2003), and “Dismantling the Promised Land: Ironies of Environmental Identity Constitution in Mark Twain’s ‘Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn’ (1880) and Hamlin Garland’s ‘Under the Lion’s Paw’ (1888)” (2007). In 2015, “Real Machines in Imaginary Gardens: Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden and Environmental Liminality in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A View of the Woods’” was published.

Achilles’s interest in notions of region, space, and place has also been profound. In 2003, he co-edited a volume on Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English, including his comprehensive introduction to the topic. Among the essays in this area are “The Subject-Object Paradigm: Conflict and Convergence in Theories of Landscape, Consciousness, and Technoscape Since Emerson and Thoreau” (2005) and “Constructions and Contestations of Home in African American Theater” (2010).

Last but not least, questions of community and identity or “identity in community” (Davis) have been central to Achilles’s research output. A few examples from various stages of his career are “Purgers and Montaged Men: Masculinity and Identity in the Fiction of Hawthorne and Poe” (1998), “Men of the Crowd: The Challenge of Urbanization and Negotiations of National Identity in Antebellum Short Stories” (2000), and “Modes of Liminality in American Short Fiction: Condensations of Multiple Identities” (2015).

Region, environment, community, and short forms are still among Achilles’s areas of interest. Some of his most recent research, such as “Changing Cultures of Solitude: Reclusiveness in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street” (2017), “Environmental Liminalities: Negotiating Metaphysics and Materialism in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, Sherwood Anderson’s and Flannery

26

O’Connor’s Short Fiction” (2017), and “Ohio in Context—Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff (2008) as Co-texts” (forthcoming), is proof of this.

Finally, by focusing on region, environment, and community in literary short forms, this special section brings together some of Achilles’s American Studies research interests with research trajectories still currently followed in American Studies at the University of Würzburg, where some of the foci are ecology and ecocritical approaches, region and diaspora, identity and community, and literature in short forms (Bergmann; Blazan; Gersdorf; Hippler; Hüttner; Nelson-Teutsch; Snyder-Körber; Raphael-Hernandez; see also Balestrini/Bergmann; Braun/Gersdorf; Finley, Raiford, and Raphael-Hernandez). Thus, this special section not only concentrates on currently topical issues in American Studies in general, but also stresses lines of continuity in Würzburg American Studies.

Ina BergmannUniversity of Würzburg, Germany

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---. “Changing Cultures of Solitude: Reclusiveness in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” Cultures of Solitude: Loneliness – Limitation – Liberation. Eds. Ina Bergmann and Stefan Hippler. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2017. 217-28. Print.

---. “Conceptualizing Cultural Identities.” (Trans)Formations of Cultural Identity in the English-Speaking World. Eds. Jochen Achilles and Carmen Birkle. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1998. 1-13. Print.

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---. “Dismantling the Promised Land: Ironies of Environmental Identity Constitution in Mark Twain’s ‘Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn’ (1880) and Hamlin Garland’s ‘Under the Lion’s Paw’ (1888).” Irony Revisited: Spurensuche in der englischsprachigen Literatur. Festschrift für Wolfgang G. Müller. Eds. Thomas Honegger, Eva-Maria Orth and Sandra Schwabe. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2007. 315-32. Print.

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---. “Silencing the Dead: Washington Irving’s Use of the Supernatural in the Context of Slavery and Genocide.” Arizona Quarterly 69.2 (Summer 2013): 1-25. Print.

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THE EMPIRE PLAYS BACK: OF MUSIC, MAGIC, AND MIGRATION

IN SARAH ORNE JEWETT’S “THE FOREIGNER”

theoRizing SelF and otheR

Migration has always been one of the most central phenomena of what today is called globalization. While Europe has only recently begun to be significantly affected by large-scale migration, it lies at the very foundation of the United States and reached a major peak at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Although migration is an ongoing process for many nations and people today, it can take on very different shapes and manifestations, and is intimately connected to questions of strangers, self vs. other, 1 home, diaspora, exile, traveling cultures, space/location, and the creation of new identities across borders, in the borderlands, and in cultural “contact zones,” as Mary Louise Pratt has famously argued. All of these terms have become buzzwords by now and require a theory of their own. This contribution will focus on the idea of the foreigner and on the dichotomy of self and/v. other, and show the relevance of these concepts for intercultural encounters. The particular form of migration underlying Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “The Foreigner” (1900) is triggered by American imperialism, with its constant flow of people, goods, capital, and culture—in this case, between Maine in New England and the Caribbean. These encounters lead to changes in societies in spite of people’s frequent resistance to integrate the outsider into the in-group

1. With the exception of quotations, I will spell “other” and “self” with small letters in the fol-lowing to indicate that this is only one of the many binary oppositions used to describe what is unfamiliar or familiar. Neither the other nor the self has fixed boundaries.

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or the outsider’s unwillingness to integrate. To depict these changes, I will use the concept of “transculturation,” whereas I will turn to Sigmund Freud’s notion of the “uncanny” to explain the resistance just mentioned.

According to Diana Taylor, transculturation is a process in which all participating cultures are transformed into something new. Françoise Lionnet agrees with the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón who wrote in 1982 that

[t]ransculturation means the constant interaction, the transmutation between two or more cultural components with the unconscious goal of creating a third cultural entity—in other words, a culture—that is new and independent even though rooted in the preceding elements. Reciprocal influence is the determining factor here, for no single element superimposes itself on another; on the contrary, each one changes into the other so that both can be transformed into a third. (qtd. in Lionnet 15-16)

Transculturation describes the mingling of cultures into something new in which self and other become one. Freud’s theory of the uncanny recognizes the co-existence of other and self, but describes the other as the repressed, rejected, and ignored part of the self. The human being is thus a miscegenated or mixed construct. Freud sees the self as familiar and accepted and the other as unfamiliar, uncanny, and, therefore, rejected. He thus equates the uncanny with the other and considers both as the result of the repression of familiar elements of the self into uncanny ones (429). We also find the unfamiliar in the familiar (Waldenfels 136). On the one hand, the other is always part of the self; on the other, anything that is unfamiliar and other will be appropriated by the self—an act motivated by the fear of what is unknown and the need for categorization. In this respect, Freud foreshadows late twentieth-century theories of the familiarization of the unfamiliar (Böhme and Böhme 282). The incorporation is necessary because, according to Georg Simmel’s (1858-1918) definition, the foreigner is the one who comes and stays (764). Additionally, according to Alfred Schütz (1899-1959), an immigrant is the prototype of a foreigner (53) who perpetuates the colonial opposition of us v. them. In order to control this opposition and to counter any definitory attempts by the other, the self has to define the other in its own terms and either incorporates it or represses it.

The following reading of Jewett’s story shows how music and magic—in the spiritual and socio-psychological sense, and in the context of migration—work as catalysts that effect changes in the rural town of Dunnet Landing and, in particular, in Mrs. Todd, one of the two female protagonists. These changes, I argue, are a form of transculturation, resulting from the intrusion of otherness into a community which, in spite of its attempts at preserving monoculturalism in almost nativist ways, gradually and imperceptibly turns transcultural—even though the “intruder” eventually leaves. At least one member of the community actively adopts features of the outsider. Freud’s uncanny and the concept of

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self and/v. other help to situate Jewett’s story in the context of intercultural encounters and subsequent processes of voluntary and involuntary forms of transculturation.

If women did write before the 1880s, they often focused on issues familiar to them, such as children, spiritual and religious matters, household management, and cookery—in short, on “married life and family problems” (Solomon 22). The stories they produced were quickly labeled as “regionalist,” “didactic,” or “domestic” fictions, and “were regarded as minor [or “ex-centric” (Hutcheon 17)] works because they dramatized ‘minor’ activities” (Solomon 25)—a trend which did not evolve until the 1960s and 70s, with the emergence of Women’s Studies and the renewed interest in forgotten women writers. Jewett (1849-1909), a New England writer from South Berwick, Maine, adopted local-color writing to look at women’s roles and places in New England. She did not see herself as a professional writer, but as someone writing sketches of New England life, which she was pleased to see published. In an 1873 letter to Horace Scudder she wrote:

It seems to me I can furnish the theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and the audience, but there never is any play! I could write you entertaining letters perhaps, from some desirable house where I was in most charming company, but I couldn’t make a story about it. . . . I am certain I could not write one of the usual magazine stories. If the editors will take the sketchy kind and people like to read them, is not it as well to do that and do it successfully . . . ? (qtd. in Petrie 116-17)

Jewett modestly describes her contribution to American magazine literature and does not reveal her own critical attitude toward the New England scenery. She wrote pleasant stories about rural New England life, did not claim universality or fame, but did make a significant contribution to American literature through her detailed analysis of New England society, its homophobia, and its resistance to change.

In most of her fiction, Jewett introduces an outside observer who views the environment in New England with fresh and open eyes as a visitor, long-time tourist, refugee, or rest-seeking towner. Consequently, Jewett’s fiction is a space in which the encounter of self and/v. other is constantly enacted in various constellations and exemplified in two “fundamental themes,” namely, “the tension between the conflicting attractions of rural and urban life” and “the tension between individualism and the participation of the self in a community identity” (Donovan 103). While gender issues play a dominant role in Jewett’s fiction, she has often been criticized for her neglect of race/ethnicity and class concerns and even reproached for “racism, classism, and ethnocentrism” (Kilcup and Edwards 15). Recent Jewett criticism, however, explores “cultural conflicts” as having “national, not merely regional, significance” (19), a trait exemplified in particular by “The Foreigner.”

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Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, Jewett’s “The Foreigner,” along with “A Dunnet Shepherdess,” “The Queen’s Twin” and “William’s Wedding,” is one of the four stories added to The Country of the Pointed Firs after the novel’s original publication in 1896. 2 “The Foreigner” is the story of a woman from an exotic place, the Caribbean, introduced to the small-town community of Dunnet Landing in Maine, New England. After losing her husband and children to yellow fever and thus becoming prey of anyone who would take care of her, the woman, later Mrs. Captain Tolland, is brought from Jamaica to New England by the merchant Captain Tolland. The move from Jamaica to New England as a result of national (economic) imperialism is not only a transplantation in geographical, but also in cultural terms because it includes changes in customs and manners, language and climate.

The following discussion of “The Foreigner” will first briefly explain the narrative structure of the story, which situates Mrs. Tolland on two levels of otherness, and then focus on the representation of imperial trade between New England and Jamaica as the basis for Mrs. Tolland’s “migration” from one place to the other. In Jewett’s story, the business conducted by men is responsible for displacement, but cultures actually come together in women-identified communities, in which the opposition of self and other collapses, at least temporarily. In a next step, I will look at the relevance of music and magic in the form of the ghost mother bringing about female community and suggesting an Africanist presence in New England. Music and magic trigger significant emotions of fun and fear and destabilize binary oppositions of self and other in social life. Moreover, they unveil analogies in the Todd and Tolland women, who are shown to mirror each other.

naRRating SelF and otheR

Jewett’s frame narrator in “The Foreigner” is a female outsider, a visitor, who keeps a critical distance while exhibiting enough curiosity to get acquainted with people in the community. At one point during their very brief friendship—between 1908 and 1909—Jewett remarked to Willa Cather: “‘You must know the world before you can know the village’” (Cather 88). This lucid statement expresses much of Jewett’s patterns in her oeuvre since the structures she sees at work in the larger world can also be detected in the smaller rural communities of New England and/or vice versa (Howard 368). For Jewett, New England was the nation in a nutshell.

One of Jewett’s major themes is the isolation and alienation of the individual, particularly that of the newly arrived in a closed community. The outsider is faced with exclusion or, at best, partial inclusion. “The Foreigner” is

2. The novel, including the four stories, was not released in its entirety until 1962 (Gleason 30).

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unusual in Jewett’s work in its dealing with an outsider from a totally different geographical and cultural background, brought into the small New England community and suffering from her own and the community’s exclusionary behavior. The frame narrator is a regional foreigner and presents a level of otherness which is not threatening but simply that of a visitor and catalyst for story-telling—as stories are typically told to those who are uninformed. Both foreigners—the narrator and Mrs. Captain Tolland—are integrated at the end by Mrs. Todd—the representative of the community—through story-telling and the recognition of motherly love in women. “As is the case with many of Jewett’s stories and sketches, a story within a story creates the narrative design and a visit provides the narrative occasion for ‘The Foreigner’” (Pryse 91). Here, the visitor talks to Mrs. Todd, her hostess, on a dreary, stormy, and rainy day, foreshadowing the story to come, and invites her to “the harmony of our fellowship” (Jewett 157), so that Mrs. Todd tells her the story of the poor Jamaican woman.

With the use of two first-person narrators—one for the frame tale and another (Mrs. Todd) for the tale within the tale—Jewett succeeds in presenting two perspectives on otherness: that of the foreigner as visitor in the community (the frame narrator) and that of the community (Mrs. Todd) toward the national foreigner (Mrs. Tolland). The binary structure in the relationship between frame narrator and narrator of the inner story is maintained. The frame narrator is story-teller and listener at the same time. Because of her status as a visitor, she depicts her own impressions, but otherwise conveys Mrs. Todd’s own vernacular. At the end of the story, oppositions between self and other seem to be at least temporarily dissolved as the frame narrator describes the pleasant atmosphere: “We sat together in silence in the warm little room” (187), and Mrs. Todd concludes that “‘the storm’s all over’” (187).

CommodiFying the otheR

The story of Mrs. Tolland has a colonial, imperial, and economic background, as her telling name may also indicate. At the end of the nineteenth century, Jamaica was a British colony while Americans were formerly colonized people who had declared their independence. At the time of the publication of “The Foreigner,” the United States had already manifested imperialist activities in the Spanish-American War of 1898, as a consequence of which they treated Filipinos in the same way that the British treated people in their Caribbean colonies—namely, as uncivilized subjects who had to be controlled. Captain Tolland, who conducts business in the sugar trade, is brought to Kingston, Jamaica. After a business deal, he and his companions spend time in a tavern where, according to the spirit of the island, they “‘felt boyish . . .’” (162). The “‘young officers in uniform’” (162), probably British soldiers, are served by

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“‘colored folks’” (162), who, at the time, already had their independence. The four captains then save a woman, an image of innocence dressed all in white, who is not a native of the island. She seems to be French, does not speak much English, but tells them that a “‘Negro’” (164) stole all her money when her husband was sick on the trip to Kingston “‘from one o’ the far Wind’ard Islands to get passage on a steamer to France . . .’” (164). The four captains draw lots and treat her like an object despite their good intentions. Captain Tolland finally has to agree to marry her because otherwise she would end up being a mistress and prostitute. She herself is never asked what she would prefer: she becomes part of the economic trade between imperialist countries and colonies. Although they do not literally buy the woman, the captains’ cargo can thus be described as “both a food commodity (sugar) and a human commodity (Mrs. Tolland)” (Kuiken 125). Additionally, as Mrs. Todd emphasizes several times, the men are “‘three sheets in the wind’” (163) meaning that they are drunk and follow their instincts more than their reason.

As a consequence of this economic deal, Mrs. Tolland, who is never given a name of her own—her maiden and former married names are left undisclosed—, is constantly labeled “‘a foreigner’” (162) and a “‘stranger’” (169). She is described by Mrs. Todd’s mother as “‘a stranger in a strange land’” (169), “‘a foreign person an’ a stranger’” (169), and by Mrs. Todd as “‘a sort of foreign cast’” (168): “‘come a foreigner and she went a foreigner, and never was anything but a stranger among our folks’” (170). Apart from the fact that these women allude to the idea of a stranger as someone who comes, stays, and leaves—which in the story receives the ironic and tragic twist that the leaving is achieved in the form of death—, three different facets of otherness are thematized in these quotes: (1) not only is Mrs. Tolland a stranger, but she arrives in a New England that is also referred to as a strange place. This idea alludes to the element of otherness within the community in an imperialist country which is both self and other depending on the perspective taken. Thus, the self is always already also other. (2) Foreigner and stranger seem to express different nuances of otherness even though the definitions of the two terms are more or less identical. Since their etymologies do not point to any decisive distinction, it could be assumed that Mrs. Todd’s mother wants to give expression to and repeatedly emphasize a feeling she has, namely that Mrs. Tolland’s otherness is not exclusively rooted in the fact that she is unknown to the New England community, but that Mrs. Tolland herself feels like a stranger. (3) Mrs. Tolland’s inclusion in the community is never achieved except through Mrs. Todd. In the following, I will look at the two levels of language and origin (ethnicity, nationality) on which Mrs. Tolland is presented as a foreigner from Mrs. Todd’s perspective.

One of the early pieces of information Mrs. Todd gives about the eponymous “foreigner” is that her language was “a poor quality o’ French, an’ she knew a little mite o’ English, but not much” (164). Thus Mrs. Tolland differs from the New England community—represented language-wise in

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Mrs. Todd’s dialect—not only because she hardly speaks English, but also because she speaks lower-class French, which perhaps hints at African origins or at least a non-French background. Creole, a mixture of different languages, including French and African languages, might also be designated. The remarks about her tongue reduce her to a primitive stage in the development of human civilization while her “very broken English, no better than a child[’s]” (168), likewise confines her to an early stage in human development, namely childhood. Language determines social positionality and a different language marks a foreigner as such. The minimal possession of the common language of a community reduces someone to the level of a minor without rights. Mrs. Tolland is the physical embodiment of the child-parent relationship between the colonies and the imperial power.

The little information Mrs. Todd has about Mrs. Tolland’s origins is based on what Captain Tolland and three other captains, among them her own father, told her about the original meeting in Kingston. The future Mrs. Tolland had lost her own people and was in need of a new identity-giving community. Supposedly, she was not a native of Jamaica but a former French citizen: “‘She come here from the French islands . . . she told me she hadn’t been in France since she was ‘so small,’ and measured me off a child o’ six’” (171); “‘[S]he was French born, an’ her first husband was a Portuguee, or somethin’’” (162)—their respective origins thus marking them as part of the colonizing nations. Consequently, even before Mrs. Tolland left Jamaica for New England, she had already been in a transitory state between Europe and the Caribbean.

FoRmS oF FeaR

Fearing Oneself

Jewett’s foreigner, Mrs. Tolland, expresses herself and her cultural origins through her music, her singing, dancing, and her guitar-playing. As an art form, music can be read as a non-verbal text. As George Steiner points out, it is “the principal language of the mind when the mind is in a condition of non-verbal feeling” (201). Both narrators tell stories about the other(s) while the musician tells her own story. In either case, artistic means of communication are resorted to. Both story and music are vehicles transporting cultural information (Piacentino) and leading to intercultural understanding, thus potentially overcoming cultural borders.

The guitar and music are for Mrs. Tolland a means of earning money, but also her way of expressing herself and connecting with her mother and her past, and ultimately with herself. Through her music, she meets her husband, Captain Tolland, and comes to New England. Although the inhabitants of

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Dunnet Landing reject the intrusion of this outsider, they approach her one day, pushed by Mrs. Todd’s mother, and are drawn into her music:

“an’ my [Mrs. Todd’s] mother . . . asked her if she wouldn’t sing somethin’, an’ up she got . . . an’ sung a lovely little song standin’ in the floor; it seemed to have something gay about it that kept a-repeatin’, an’ nobody could help keepin’ time, an’ all of a sudden she looked round at the tables and caught up a tin plate that somebody’d fetched a Washin’ton pie in, an’ she begun to drum on it with her fingers like one o’ them tambourines, an’ went right on singin’ faster an’ faster, and next minute she begun to dance a little pretty dance between the verses, just as light and pleasant as a child. You couldn’t help seein’ how pretty ’twas; we all got to trottin’ a foot, an’ some o’ the men clapped their hands quite loud, a-keepin’ time, ’twas so catchin’, an’ seemed so natural to her. There wa’n’t one of ’em but enjoyed it; she just tried to do her part, and some urged her on, till she stopped with a little twirl of her skirts an’ went to her place again by mother. And I can see mother now, reachin’ over an’ smilin’ an’ pattin’ her hand.” (166-67)

The villagers are fascinated by her music and drawn into participating in the singing and dancing. During the event, the community sees her as a child who is totally harmless and entertaining, as Friedemann Ehrenforth suggests: “The emotional effect of music . . . has the power to bring us back to our phylogenetic dawn of history” (515). Additionally, Mrs. Tolland not only “performs” her own inner self but also that of others, thus practicing a form of resistance against segregation. Here, self and other meet on the deeper level of the unconscious, in a regression to childhood provoked by music. Music becomes a language they can all understand as long as they let go of social norms and limitations.

Even though Gabriele Hansen is right in saying that the majority of the villagers are angry because Mrs. Tolland does not assimilate into village conventions (108), their reaction the next day is rather based on their own fear of themselves. As if waking up from a deep sleep or a dream, the members of the community are ashamed of their own behavior, of having let themselves go, of having exposed themselves to the outside and enjoyed themselves in public. In a way, the community enacts what Ehrenforth refers to as “the debate [occurring between 1880 and 1910] about the evolutionary origins and functions of music” (506), a debate which purported “to understand the power of music in relation to sexual emotion” (506)—since, as was argued at the time, music “plays an important part in sexual selection” (504). In “The Foreigner,” the members of the community seem to fear this idea because it might disrupt the apparently peaceful surface of their lives and, as a result, they reject the woman’s music the next day.

Here, the Puritan restrictions on frivolous singing and dancing as sinful come to mind. 3 The kind of singing and dancing Mrs. Tolland engages in—in

3. Cf. Hawthorne’s short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1836). In this story, John

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contrast to the quiet, unemotional, and quite amateurish and false singing of two community women—evokes exoticism, the Caribbean islands, probably also sinful sexuality and frequentation of forbidden places such as brothels and bars, as the original meeting between her and the four Captains in Jamaica also suggests. Shocked by the revelation that these sinful activities seem to be part of some secret desires in themselves, the community members condemn Mrs. Tolland the next day for having brought their inner selves out in the open (167). The village people have crossed the threshold 4 leading from a puritanically defined life into an inner life of desire, release, and relief, thus undergoing a liminal experience without, however, taking the journey all the way. They immediately return to the initial stage. Mrs. Todd compares Mrs. Tolland entering the church after this event to “‘a cat in a strange garret’” (167). Such comparison, nevertheless, suggests some kind of belonging, since Mrs. Todd’s story-telling is accompanied by a cat, present in her house (Anderson 394). The community’s fearful reaction is also questioned by Mrs. Todd’s visit to the foreign woman afterwards, so that at least in this way the foreigner “is [ultimately] integrated into, rather than cast out of, female consciousness” (Ammons 179).

Fear of God’s Punishment

Religion triggers in the villagers a fear of their own sinfulness. It is a fear of God’s punishment and perhaps also the fear of potentially being relegated to the margins of their community and becoming outsiders themselves. Martha Nussbaum, in her study on The Monarchy of Fear (2018), argues that “to have fear, all you need is an awareness of danger looming” and “some sense, however vague, of one’s own good or ill” (24). Nussbaum refers to Aristotle’s idea of “fear as pain at the seeming presence of some impending bad thing, combined with the feeling that you are powerless to ward it off” (24). Two issues are relevant here. On the one hand, terms such as “awareness,” “sense,” “vague” as well as “looming” indicate the presence of something very unspecific, something that is not tangible, something that has not yet arrived but might arrive. On the other hand, terms such as “danger” and “good or ill” imply a potential threat to one’s

Endicott, “the Puritan of Puritans” (887), destroys the maypole and takes all dancers priso-ner, including the Lord and Lady of the May, a young couple just married. The grim, stern, and dark Puritans stand in complete opposition to the merry, bright, and laughing people of Merry Mount.4. The image of a threshold is very prominent in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). The eponymous protagonist crosses the threshold of his house to go on his “‘errand,’” with “his present evil purpose” (1033), thus moving from village to woods, from belief to disbelief, from clarity to ambiguity. He returns, unsure about what he has seen and what he can believe in. Like the foreigner, he dies as an outsider in his village, and the com-munity “carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom” (1042).

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physical as well as moral well-being and safety. Hence, the villagers’ reactions to the singing and dancing of the one outsider of the village is specifically moral in tone: they believe to be “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” to use the title of the 1741 sermon by Jonathan Edwards that paints a powerful and angry God who punishes human beings for their religious and ethical disobedience and deviation from God’s rules. According to Edwards, God’s judgement will be more fearful than we can comprehend; God’s wrath could be upon us at any moment; and it is the devil who controls sinfulness. In this line of reasoning, therefore, the community’s behavior on the previous evening would appear to have been controlled by the devil. Consequently, Mrs. Tolland could be considered the devil’s ally or the incarnation of the devil himself. According to Edwards, the human sinner is like a spider that God’s hands hold over the fire and can let go any minute. It is not by chance that Mrs. Tolland’s house, after her death, burns down in a fire that completes God’s wrath, as the villagers might be led to believe.

Edwards’s sermon was written long before Jewett’s short stories, at a time when many New Englanders had already moved away from the early covenant with God to a half-way covenant, when the Salem witchcraft trials had left serious scars in the population, and when people had begun to be more rational and secular. However, it was also the time of the Great Awakening (1720s–40s) that is believed to have had a strong impact on American society, counteracting the Age of Reason/Enlightenment. This emotional return to the religious belief in everyone’s sinfulness—that could only be redeemed by God—was revived in the Second Great Awakening in the 1790s and the Third Great Awakening in the 1850s, which lasted until the early twentieth century and covers the time of Jewett’s life and writing.

Ultimately, the villagers’ fear is part of a religious belief system—Puritanism—that affects individual lives, but also shapes collective behavior through the insecurity about redemption—whether or not it will be obtained and by whom, which behavior could contribute to it, and which will prevent it from happening. The Dunnet Landing population has learned its “map of the world, and [has] learn[ed] what is good and bad in it” (Nussbaum 28). Their encounter with Mrs. Tolland is that of “the West” which, as defined by Nussbaum is white and Christian, with an other that is non-white and not of the Puritan faith (58-59). Mrs. Tolland thus becomes the villagers’ scapegoat. Their anxiety about not being among those chosen by God for redemption because of their “sinful” behavior the night before provokes their “fear-driven” anger (63), as they blame her “for the pain of fear” (62), a process Nussbaum calls “fear-anger or even fear-blame” (70).

Furthermore, the community dancing is a strong reminder of the scene in the Jamaican tavern where the four New England captains encounter the foreigner for the first time. They feel “‘boyish’” (162) when they enter the bar where the young woman sings and plays the guitar. From the perspective of Mrs. Todd’s narrative, it is “‘a wasteful scene’” (162), and not one in which,

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as Mrs. Todd comments, “‘church members in good standin’’” (163) would want to take part: “‘they wouldn’t lend theirselves to no such kick-shows as that,’” so that they almost have to fight their way out (163). They consider the scene incompatible with their Protestantism. While the four captains are able to resist the temptation—at least to some extent, depending on how one reads Captain Tolland’s later marriage—the members of the community cannot resist the lure of gaiety. Part of the “scandal” provoked by the dancing is that it happens in “‘the Orthodox vestry’” (167), so that the juxtaposition of the tavern and of a religious place must annoy and frighten the community even more. The opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism is an influential factor in Mrs. Tolland’s exclusion from the community, who understand that she is “‘a Catholic by her beads and all,’” something which, as Mrs. Todd critically points out, “‘had set some narrow minds against her’” (174). When the Todd women manage to bring a Catholic priest to Mrs. Tolland’s deathbed with the help of Uncle Lorenzo, they learn that while the foreigner is indeed a Catholic, she was “‘reared among the heathen,’” in the Caribbean, but also that “‘there might be roads leadin’ up to the New Jerusalem from various points’” (175).

This scene displays Mrs. Tolland’s double outsiderism in the New England community in terms of religion. Not only is she Catholic but also a heathen, an unbeliever, from a Protestant point of view. The last, more optimistic sentence is spoken by “Reverend Mr. Bascom” at the foreigner’s funeral and reveals his relative openness toward Catholicism as he provides her with a funeral ceremony and allows for her potential arrival in the New Jerusalem after death. In contrast to the community’s aversive behavior, the Reverend paints a much more benign picture of a God who is not angry and who does not simply choose those who believe to be predetermined as God’s chosen people.

Fear of Racial Animality

Apart from religious implications, racial prejudices play a role in the villagers’ fear. As already stated, the foreigner embodies the other also because of her outward appearance and origin. As Nussbaum explains, fear entails disgust, and “projective disgust” (108) has to do with the “animality” (106) of human beings. People try to hide bodily necessities and urges, and sexuality is among the most intimate desires. If singing and dancing bring out sexuality, then, as a consequence, people are ashamed of it. They are afraid of their own mortality—implied by their carnal nature—and that God will simply see them as animals that can be crushed at any moment. Being like an animal would destroy their feeling of superiority in the hierarchy of living beings and of pertaining to God’s chosen people. As Nussbaum puts it,

what if we could identify a group of human beings whom we could see as more animal than we are, more sweaty, more smelly, more sexual, more suffused

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with the stench of mortality? If we could identify such a group of humans and subordinate them successfully, we might feel more secure. Those are the animals, not us. (110)

This is exactly what the villagers do. They identify the darker woman from the Caribbean as the inferior “animal” so that they can be sure about their closeness to God. When this hierarchy is threatened through the communal music, when biology and sexual drive overpower religious and moral beliefs, the villagers have to reject the intruder who overthrows their order; they have to rebuild this hierarchical relationship for their own (imagined) safety, because they need to reestablish their feeling of (relative) security in an already fragile religious system that never gives them total assurance of redemption. Moreover, the second half of the nineteenth century was a time of increasing international trade, of (im)migration, and emancipation movements culminating at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century—a set of transformations which generally left people unsure and perhaps helpless with regard to larger social changes.

Mrs. Todd’s depiction of the evening also relies on terms such as “child,” “catchin’,” “tambourines,” and “natural” (167). While the use of the child simile suggests innocence as well as the return to potential primitiveness, the comparison of the tin that has provided food—a Washington pie—to a tambourine immediately evokes its Egyptian origins but also, from a linguistic point of view, French connections. The historical use of the tambourine is multi-facetted. In visual representations, angels are playing the tambourine, but it was also the instrument of traveling entertainers and minstrels (Vienna Symphonic Library). The tambourine “stands for folk entertainment, dance . . . and also . . . accentuate[s] the rhythm and create[s] a bright musical background” (Vienna Symphonic Library). As a consequence, in the nineteenth-century US, it was used by African American vaudeville and minstrel performers, often in front of white audiences. In the 1840s, Master Juba toured with a group called Ethiopian Serenaders (Robinson 366). Some of this information might actually have been on Jewett’s mind when writing the story, but, even if not, she certainly must have been influenced by some of the associations connected to an instrument used in settings and on occasions that were clearly rejected as sinful by a Puritan-shaped mindset, let alone the fact that it was perceived as an instrument played by African Americans and originating in the Arab world.

Like “child” and “tambourine,” “natural” suggests primitivism. How can song and dance be the “natural” means of expression for a young woman? Nature is, of course, often defined in opposition to culture. If Mrs. Tolland’s performance is “natural,” then it becomes part of who she is—bodily and mentally. It is ascribed to her as essential. If Mrs. Tolland is “nature”—so to speak—then she is not “culture” and, from the villagers’ point of view, she does not belong to the community. Yet, Mrs. Todd’s comment is not meant to be exclusive but rather to depict an enjoyable experience. While in the second half

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of the nineteenth century, nature began to assume realistic connotations, it was still placed outside the social and the cultural, although it was closely observed and studied. Literary naturalism expressed the Darwinian ideas of human beings as determined by heritage, environment, and biology. Consequently, if Mrs. Tolland is “natural,” she is determined by forces outside of her reach that have indelibly shaped her identity. According to this logic, Mrs. Tolland is bound to belong to “nature” and has no chance of ever being identified with “culture.” She is relegated to a “‘state of nature’ in the Rousseauian sense, with freedom to wander or dress without constraint” (Fensham 5).

What is implied in this culture-nature binary, of course, is a hierarchy that is usually gendered, but also racial. As Rachel Fensham argues, “[o]ther binary differences regard Culture as about civilization, and Nature as that which belongs to so-called primitive society” (6). Consequently, the other is equal to nature, primitivism, and infantilization. Yet, for Mrs. Todd, this naturalness evokes joy, maybe even a desire to belong to this other world, as well as motherly feelings. Fensham refers to feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, who claims that “nature might be rethought. Rather than counter its value, she suggests we consider its affirmative potential ‘outside’ culture, yet capable of becoming a force within culture” (7). I suggest that this is what Mrs. Todd does. She wants to incorporate nature into culture, so as to make the former less threatening, as in the case of the knowledge she has gained from Mrs. Tolland about herbs and plants—a knowledge that for others in the community suggests secrecy and potential evil, perhaps even witchcraft, and that intrudes into “the community’s . . . own monolithic white Protestant identity” (Kuiken 126).

Fear of the Female Body

As Johanna Heil argues, “it is the female dancing body that is constructed as this irrational Other, which leads the rational and moral subject astray and lures it into a state of trance and frenzy” (166). This depiction of the fear of the female body immediately evokes the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials, in which the accusation of sorcery was often mostly derived from young girls’ fits and frenzy, seemingly caused by the devil. Salem, too, had its other, Tituba, a black slave from the Caribbean, who would perform—from the point of view of the villagers—strange rituals and dancing at night in the woods, luring innocent children into her aura. The parallels are striking, but the time difference is almost two hundred years. Heil also points to the influence of Cotton and Increase Mather’s religious tracts, such as the latter’s “An Arrow against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing: Drawn out of the Quiver of the Scriptures” (1684), and their lasting impact on American society until the late nineteenth century (168-69), insinuating the idea of “dancing as a pagan practice perpetuated by heathens, and ultimately as the devil’s work” (170).

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In his anti-dance treatise, Increase Mather calls the dancing of men with women “Promiscuous Dancing” (105), considers it “unlawful” and a “great Sin” (105) condemned by the Scriptures, and proceeds to explain why God punishes those who dance with a person of the other sex. Mather, of course, was able to draw on “a long tradition of authority from Continental and British scholars” (Wagner 3), which means that while the anti-dance stance did not originate in the New World, it did emerge in America with the Puritans (Knowles 5) and found adherers and proclaimers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as the Reverend George Whitefield (1714-70), the Baptist Reverend Oliver Hart (1723-95), the Reverend William Lyman (1764-1833), and many others. As Mark Knowles argues, for the Christian churches, when “women and dancing mixed, wickedness resulted” (3). For the Puritans, dancing was “a heathen and barbaric practice” (3). The subsequent centuries saw the progressive acceptance of specific forms of dancing, although “tensions” between “supporter and detractors” (6) continued to exist. For Baptist minister Oliver Hart, writing in 1778, “dances [still] were the work of the devil” (6). These ideas continued to be expressed, in particular in nineteenth-century “anti-dance literature,” written predominantly by “white, Protestant, male evangelists and clergy who held rigid traditionalist views about the roles of women in society. These men admonished women that dancing always led to pernicious ends” (6). They also related dance to “base animal sensuality” (8) and saw it as “the work of the Devil who uses women to seduce men into lust” (12).

Up until the end of the nineteenth century, dancing—at balls—was frequently considered indecent for young women while, at the same time, it was also part of the social conventions of upper-class society. Increasingly, in the nineteenth century, manuals for young ladies were published and contained suggestions on dancing and on how to keep in good health in spite of the ballroom dances (Wagner 131). Opinions and advice on dancing were mixed: some argued against it on moral and medical grounds; others promoted it for social purposes. And some were strongly opposed to it. Those were often “evangelical Protestant clergy” and “had a Puritan outlook” (146). As Thomas A. Faulkner explains in 1894 when describing the dancing of a young woman with “the Apollo of the evening” (116),

[s]he is filled with the rapture of sin in its intensity; her spirit is inflamed with passion and lust is gratified in thought. With a last low wail the music ceases, and the dance for the night is ended, but not the evil work of the night. . . . that beautiful girl who entered the dancing school as pure and innocent as an angel three months ago returns to her home that night robbed of that most precious jewel of womanhood—virtue! (116)

Faulkner continues to describe the girl’s ultimate fate as “a brothel inmate” (116) while the Apollo continues his search for further victims. Faulkner’s

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strong opinion is that ballroom dance and subsequent drinking, which he calls “the devil’s best agent” (118), destroy and ruin young girls. Similarly, “the Orthodox vestry” in Jewett’s Dunnet Landing turns into a ballroom of sin because, as the villagers feel, the foreigner has taken advantage of them and might ruin them if they let her back into their community.

It was not until the twentieth century—beginning with Perry Miller’s The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939)—that a “much happier picture of the Puritan as a religious person preparing for the next world but also a social person committed to enjoying moderate pleasures in the present one” (Daniels 12) finally began to emerge. It seems that Jewett presents her community of Dunnet Landing as a combination of both worldviews. Mrs. Todd and her mother seem to enjoy the dancing and do not have any regrets the next day. They certainly do not—perhaps because of their closeness to the foreigner—condemn her as the devil’s collaborator. The community, however, does precisely that and shows that the Puritan cultural and religious imaginary is still very much at work. That Puritans never believed “that actions were sinful merely because they were enjoyable” (Daniels 12) simply had not yet reached most of the late nineteenth-century members of the New England village community.

After all, from an anthropological perspective, Mrs. Tolland’s rite of passage from separation via transition to integration is disrupted and returns her to the original stage of a foreigner who is punished for crossing socio-cultural boundaries (Jaimangal-Jones, Pritchard, and Morgan 262) and taking the community from a known to an unknown or liminal state of being (263). The Todd women might be considered as descendants of the early Puritan dissenters or as the believers in the Half-Way Covenant, or they might simply be among the many New Englanders who never were full members of the Puritan church. The differences between them and the community reveal that New England was much more diverse than traditional historiography and literature, for example by Nathaniel Hawthorne, have always argued. In 1900, Jewett was able to allude to “the richness or the reality of New England’s past” (Daniels 22) without yet celebrating its diversity. Obviously, the village community remains an entity with unnamed and unknown members whose individuality is and can never be revealed because they have to disappear behind the shield of conformity and uniformity. They need to belong in order to feel safe (McMillan and Chavis 9). Because their “sense of order and authority [is] deteriorating,” they need “an issue around which . . . [to] unite. The community . . . needed a deviant to denounce and punish as a whole” (9).

Fear of Disease and Determination

Another striking choice of words in the description of the singing and dancing is the phrase “’twas so catchin’” (167), which is in line with “You couldn’t help seein’” (167) and “an’ nobody could help keepin’ time” (166).

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This terminology highlights two aspects in the context of the late nineteenth-century development and perpetuation of Puritan-inspired fear. While the idea of “catching something” implies an unavoidable potential illness or disease that one is infected with—we just have to look at the expression “to catch a cold”—the other two parallel phrases, relying on a “could(n’t) help + -ing” structure, suggest a loss of willpower and of the ability to resist something. In both cases, human beings are at the mercy of a force more powerful than themselves. Through their rejection of the foreigner the day after the dancing, the villagers are able to keep these forces at bay but are shaken in their basic beliefs and instilled with fear of the unknown.

“Catching a disease” is strongly evocative of epidemics developing at the time, and that had already rattled nineteenth-century America. Frequent cholera and yellow fever epidemics (Gessner) and death resulting from typhoid fever and tuberculosis were very common experiences all over the US, and not just in the nineteenth century. The yellow fever outbreak in 1793 in Philadelphia in the initial phases of the new nation that was still in the process of defining itself has never lost its “metaphorical usability” (Gessner 91) and shows, as Ingrid Gessner convincingly argues, “a nation in crisis in the 1790s and entangled in international politics” (91). In spite of the Monroe Doctrine (1823) that proclaimed American non-interference in European matters (but also precluded European interference in the American hemisphere), the US, at the time “The Foreigner” came out, was involved not only in international markets but also as an imperial power in world politics—the Spanish-American War of 1898 constitutes an apt illustration.

Disease, infection, contagion, epidemics, and many more such terms, represent actual socio-political and, of course, health phenomena that point to a nation in crisis. And it is this crisis that is often depicted and discussed in literary and cultural representations—as Jewett’s story also insinuates, even if only mildly so. Risk, crisis, and fear go hand in hand with the spread of a disease and result in a “culture of fear” (Glassner). One notices it spreading among the villagers the day after the dance, even more conspicuously than the actual outbreak of a disease. It is this fear of a metaphorical disease of moral sinfulness that results in the exclusion of Eliza Tolland—an exclusion made so powerful by the combination of disease, fear (of contagion), crisis (in the religious belief system), and morality. It is no coincidence that a woman from the Caribbean seems to be the carrier of an unknown “disease” in Jewett’s narrative. As early as the late eighteenth century in Philadelphia, people speculated about the origins and the spread of yellow fever. As Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Arthur Mervyn, or, Memories of the Year 1793 (1799-1800) illustrates, (im)migrants, sailors, and merchants from the Caribbean were—among other theories—suspected of carrying the deadly disease and infecting the nation.

The prominent concept of naturalism, by stipulating that human beings are determined by their environment, heredity, and biology, sustains

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this fear of a higher power. Naturalism also suggests that human beings are helpless in front of forces they cannot even fully understand—whether it is an indifferent nature, as Stephen Crane illustrates in his short story “The Open Boat” (1897), or an all-powerful divine being, a God. The larger belief is, as Donald Pizer affirms, that both realism and naturalism arose as a response to the “‘disjunctures’” “between the language of hope in America’s civil religion and the actuality of the world encountered” (16). As Louis J. Budd argues, the Naturalists’ “approach to psychology could let mistrust overpower conscious will” (43), which is what Jewett’s community experiences in the dancing event. This is not to claim that Jewett was a naturalist but rather that she picked up on intellectual and social developments of her time and experimented with features of naturalism in her fiction.

The “cultural work” (Tompkins) accomplished by Jewett’s story lies in the acknowledgement of people’s fear of losing control over their bodies and minds. They fear the unknown (like a disease) against which nothing can be done and to which one has to submit. In line with Rüdiger Kunow’s notion of “material bodies,” there is much that cannot be influenced, changed, or understood in an actual encounter:

The materiality of human life does not simply give itself over to human designs or desires. Congenital impairment, infectious diseases or processes of aging are reminders of the oftentimes stubborn, refractory character of human biology. Nor does this biology yield its secrets to the human desire for knowledge—as countless myths, legends, Shamanistic procedures or the contested protocols of modern science demonstrate. (xiii-xiv)

Jewett portrays the actual physical encounter of bodies, but at the same time elevates this encounter to the level of metaphor. The encounter is a moment of emotional, mental, even metaphysical intermingling, that can only be undone—although with multiple scars—through the physical exclusion and moral condemnation of the one perceived as the intruder. While for the Protestant community, dancing and singing represent such a disease, Jewett’s focalizer in the story within the story—the first-person narrator, Mrs. Todd—is critical of the unquestioned rejection of the unknown. Quite the opposite, she shows how enriching Mrs. Tolland could have been for the community, for example by teaching them the use of herbs and plants.

haunting motheRS and daughteRS

Jewett’s “The Foreigner” is not the only story at the end of the nineteenth century to feature a ghostly appearance. The ghost’s reemergence in the 1890s in “prominent realist women writers” (Gentile 208) points to the relevance

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of spiritualism in US society at the time. The “rise of American spiritualism” is evident in the “increasing public fascination with seances, mesmerism, and spirit autobiographies” (209) and actually found respectability with the foundation of “Societies for Psychical Research” (209). Women writers such as Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are some of the best-known examples of this trend. Overall, ghosts are a prominent element in American literature, with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) as one of the more recent examples. The ghost is usually an element of the past, a memory, a warning, a residual presence, a reminder of something that does not seem to be at rest. As a rule, it appears in moments of heightened emotions and often serve as a catalyst of reconciliation with the past.

Ghosts were very much present in the late nineteenth-century US, and not only in ghost stories. At the time, Native Americans were still considered white people’s others. They practiced seemingly exotic rituals, one of them being the Ghost dance. On this occasion, the dancers would express what “they had seen in the spirit world” (Mooney 28) and how they had reconnected with “departed friends” (28). As James A. Mooney explains, this experience derives from the “most important feature of the Ghost dance, and the secret of the trances,” which is “hypnotism” (29), a technique resorted to by the indigenous priests. Young women were “usually the first to be affected” (30) by this supernatural force, as it was then thought of. Although this practice gradually diminished in the late nineteenth century, losing its spiritual purposes in the process, it was still widely spread across the Native tribes and not unknown in most states in the US. The Ghost dance combines bodily movement and spiritual desires, frenzy, ecstasy, and trance, which is also how Mrs. Todd describes the community’s dancing experience. With the dance being associated with evil and sinfulness and the primitive (Native) other, the ghost is even more frightening and yet, for Mrs. Tolland and Mrs. Todd, is a connection to the world of departed family and—in religious terms—eternal life.

Ghosts, however, are clearly not of this world, so that their appearance, as in Jewett’s story, characterizes them as “foreigners” in their own right—something which makes the title of the story ambiguous, as both Mrs. Tolland and her (ghost) mother could therefore be the eponymous foreigner (Gentile 211). Moreover, if the ghost is the/a foreigner, the two earthly women are joined in opposition to the spiritual mother figure. From a different perspective, the relationship becomes a triangle of three women, one from New England, one from the Caribbean and/or the Old World, and one from an out-of-the-world space. This shows that Jewett’s New England is dominated by women and becomes a cultural contact zone with mutual exchange, from which, however, the villagers exclude themselves. Almira Todd, who is mentioned to be an herbalist in The Country of the Pointed Firs, is thus placed, in “The Foreigner,” “in close connection with nature” (Karpinski 144). She is therefore more receptive to the woman from the Caribbean and her way of dealing with herbs

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and plants. On the other hand, she is also “at the center of a network of social and socially useful relations” (144), and through the “summer boarder who is a writer from the big city” (144) she keeps “in touch with the world of affairs” (144). Generally, as Kirsten Møllegaard maintains with reference to María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren’s anthology, The Spectralities Reader (2013),

Ghostliness is part of everyday experience and our conception of space. It is also a catalyst of historical events and a lens through which the boundaries of past and present begin to blur. Spectrality has to do with visions and the act of looking as much as it has to do with sensing and feelings, especially with the uncanny sensation of alienation and helplessness. (373)

Ghosts are an essential ingredient in Gothic fiction, which experienced a revival in the nineteenth century. From a gender perspective, early Gothic fiction in England—epitomized by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)—almost always features a damsel in distress and a villain who persecutes her, as well as Gothic locations such as churches and castles. In the so-called New England Gothic, the element of the supernatural occurs in an almost all-women community and is more of a support than a threat. In Jewett’s story, the ghost appears when the community between Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Tolland becomes more difficult because of the villagers’ shunning of the woman from the Caribbean. The ideal relationship is either that between women or between mother and daughter, as Mrs. Todd’s own relationship with her eighty-four-year-old mother shows—a relationship which finds its other-worldly parallel in the ghost mother and her daughter. In this sense, the ghost mother’s appearance is an affirmation of mother-daughter and, more generally, feminine relationships. All four women are widows, and it is remarkable that the ghost is not Mrs. Tolland’s husband, father, or even child, but her mother. These bonds are depicted as being the strongest. Therefore, the haunting mother and the haunted daughter become a mirror image of the Todd women’s unity.

From a racial perspective, Mitzi Schrag argues in her essay “‘Whiteness’ as Loss in ‘The Foreigner’” that “Mrs. Tolland’s difference suggests ‘American Africanism’; the history of Mrs. Tolland’s life in and rescue from Jamaica connects her with accounts of African slaves in the U.S. and in the Caribbean” (191). The “rematerialization of Mrs. Tolland’s dead mother,” her knowledge of herbs and charms, and her singing and dancing “connect[-] both women [mother and daughter] with Jamaican obeah and with the spiritualism in which Jewett believed, which traced some of its ideas to West African roots” (192). Indications of Mrs. Tolland’s Africanism are certainly there, but almost unnoticeably so, and can always also be explained by particular circumstances. The night she dies, her mother appears to Mrs. Todd as “‘a woman’s dark face’” (184), “‘shaped somethin’ like Mis’ Tolland’s’” (186). Since Mrs. Tolland’s

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appearance is obviously different, but not different enough to prevent Captain Tolland from marrying her at a time of interracial marriage taboos, she may be considered to be passing for white or to be white. Her mother’s dark face suggests blackness, perhaps slavery, and may indicate a possible mixed marriage of a white (Portuguese) father and a black (slave) mother living in France—since at that time miscegenation was not taboo there, and legally possible. Before coming to Jamaica, Mrs. Tolland had lived on the French islands, thus in French colonies, another suggestion that she may actually have African Caribbean origins. Although this last point is uncertain, she does have French, Portuguese, and Caribbean origins, which she transplants to New England where the population, with the exception of Mrs. Todd and her mother, is not ready to accept any kind of difference. The ghost of the Jamaican woman’s mother as an emblem of motherly love mediates between her and Mrs. Todd, thus between her as a foreigner and Mrs. Todd as a native, between two cultures but also between two daughters.

Jewett’s New England short stories center around women. She does not depict great heroines but average women struggling with everyday problems of life and death, illness and poverty, and relationships, all deeply ingrained in New England landscapes and seascapes (Cather 82). In this line, all the protagonists in “The Foreigner” are women: Mrs. Tolland from the Caribbean, the narrator from out of town, and Mrs. Todd from Dunnet Landing. Finally, the ghost that appears to Mrs. Tolland on her deathbed is the ghost of her mother. 5 Through sounds produced by her guitar and the wind, Mrs. Tolland reconnects with her mother and, as it seems, with her inner self. Even after Mrs. Tolland’s death, Mrs. Todd hears “‘some long notes o’ dronin’ music from upstairs that chilled [her] to the bone’” (176). Like a supernatural power, the wind seems to brush the strings of the guitar in the same way it does the night Mrs. Tolland dies:

“We had the window open to give her air, an’ now an’ then a gust would strike that guitar that was on the wall and set it swinging by the blue ribbon, and soundin’ as if somebody begun to play it. I come near takin’ it down, but you never know what’ll fret a sick person an’ put ’em on the rack, an’ that guitar was one o’ the few things she’d brought with her.” (184)

The guitar is Mrs. Tolland’s means of expression and language, with which she seems to call for her mother. By uniting the foreigner and the native, the two daughters, on the deathbed and by completing the mirror image of two

5. Cynthia J. Davis argues that “the story can and has been read as a tribute to [Celia] Thaxter, who died shortly before ‘The Foreigner’ was written and who, like the foreigner, claims to have seen her mother’s ghost beside her own deathbed” (98).

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pairs of mothers and daughters, the ghost mother can be called an agent of transculturation who brings two cultures together and changes them.

As in a ghost-story, the ghost of Mrs. Tolland’s mother appears, visible also to Mrs. Todd. Even after forty years when the latter tells the story to her guest (Church 56), she still believes in the appearance of this ghost. Both Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Tolland share the same vision: “‘I couldn’t tell the shape, but ’twas a woman’s dark face lookin’ right at us; ’twa’n’t but an instant I could see. I felt dreadful cold, and my head begun to swim; I thought the light went out; ’twa’n’t but an instant, as I say, an’ when my sight come back I couldn’t see nothing there’” (184). Mrs. Todd understands the relevance of this appearance because she tells Mrs. Tolland: “‘you ain’t never goin’ to feel strange an’ lonesome no more’” (186). The transculturating mother finds her parallel in Mrs. Todd’s mother, who is responsible for the friendship between Mrs. Todd and the Jamaican woman. Both have suffered various kinds of losses. Shortly before Mrs. Tolland arrives in Dunnet Landing, Mrs. Todd loses her husband:

Perhaps most striking in these reconstructed events is the fact that Mrs. Todd is herself in mourning, a circumstance that, testifying to its profound importance to her, she obscures in vague generalizations and interpolated phrases about the loss of her husband and father . . . What is also striking is how her experiences with death very much parallel Mrs. Tolland’s, to the point of simultaneity. It is a pregnant coincidence that just when Almira Todd becomes a young widow, a foreign young widow surprisingly arrives in Dunnet Landing, freshly remarried. (Church 59)

The ghostly appearance of the mother “is a representation of an absent (dead) person, the presence of absence” (Church 55). The unity between mother and child is reestablished; the yearning for protection and safety in the place of origin with the mother figure is finally realized. At the moment of death, Mrs. Tolland regresses to the state of an infant—although not the kind the villagers turn her into—and desires to return to a realm that even predates birth, the mother’s womb. However, the desire for reunification with the mother also expresses a belief in life after death, motivated by Mrs. Tolland’s Catholicism.

In contrast to theories which consider the separation from the mother as instrumental in the creation of a child’s separate identity, Jewett instrumentalizes the reunification of mother and child in death to establish connections between women across ethnic and national borders. The mother may have African features and thus join African, Caribbean, and New England/American cultures. Motherhood, a mother’s love for her child, and the recognition of this love can cross geographical, national, and ethnic barriers and unite people. Moreover, the ghost mother is also a projection of Mrs. Todd’s own desire for her mother although their relationship has been troubled. Even

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shortly before her death, Mrs. Tolland shows Mrs. Todd how to “‘imagine new things’” (172). 6 The appearance of this magic ghost woman is accompanied by cosmic outbreaks such as a “gale” (176). Microcosm and macrocosm are aligned with and mirror each other. The turbulent weather reflects the inner turmoil Mrs. Tolland experiences on her deathbed. Despite all these supernatural elements, Mrs. Todd insists that it was not “‘beyond reason I should see the other watcher. I saw plain enough there was somebody there with me in the room’” (186). The ghost mother is a presence in-between: between life and death, African and American cultures, the colonies and the imperial power, Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Tolland, the supernatural and reality, and between heaven and earth. She reveals this in-betweenness as a parallel to the New England women. Mrs. Todd shudders, not because she is afraid of the ghost, but because she sees herself and her own mother reflected in this appearance.

diSSolving the SelF and the otheR

As I have argued in this analysis of Jewett’s short story, the binary opposition between the self and the other, with the other usually being labeled as foreigner or stranger, is ultimately overcome through story-telling, music, and the appearance of the ghost mother as a magic woman. Mrs. Tolland, the outsider, legally becomes part of the community of Dunnet Landing through intermarriage to Captain Tolland, who is of good old and respectable New England stock. Socially, Mrs. Todd’s mother, who lives out on Green Island and is not always present, and Mrs. Todd herself, both widowed, attempt to understand and integrate the exotic-looking woman into the community. Through her music, Mrs. Tolland not only opens up to the community but finds access, at least for one evening, to people’s exposed inner selves. She makes them recognize that they are much closer to the foreign woman than they can rationally accept, that is, that the foreign, the other, is always already part of the

6. Davis reads the relationship between Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Tolland as characterized by “ho-moerotic undercurrents defining the female bonds that Jewett’s narrative both depicts and creates yet never overtly acknowledges” (96). She argues that “[a]lthough the love the forei-gner receives in the end is in fact maternal, critics’ willingness to take such a love at its face value has resulted in a failure to recognize the rich metaphoric and metonymic devices that facilitate such literal and ultimately superficial readings” (96). Since Jewett wrote this story at a time when homosexuality was publicly debated and because of her own woman-identified relationships, such a reading is possible. Also, considering the villagers’ rejection of Mrs. Tol-land after the dancing and singing because of their fear of a connection between music and sexuality, Mrs. Todd’s subsequent friendship with Mrs. Tolland, and the reappearance of the musical motif, the final deathbed scene can be read as a representation of subconsciously homoerotic desires in Mrs. Tolland, Mrs. Todd, and the ghost mother, as well as between Mrs. Todd and the unnamed narrator on another level. However, one might just as well read the scene as a desire for women’s community.

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self. Emotions of joy and fear, which are, otherwise, mostly absent in Dunnet Landing, come to the fore but cannot be acknowledged permanently because they are “tainted” with morally sinful behavior and a loss of control which need to be repressed. The return of the repressed, in Freud’s terminology, only happens once. Furthermore, as Heil argues, “dancing bodies,” and those of women in particular, “have always also stirred up religious, moral, and political objections” (165). Fear dominates the life of the villagers; they are afraid of recognizing themselves in the foreign woman. They fear that she might represent what they have always wanted to be but simply could not acknowledge. Therefore, music, dancing, and singing are associated with animality, disease, sin, the evil, forbidden sexuality, and primitivism.

However, Mrs. Todd goes further in her acquaintance with the outsider and begins to understand her, which is clearly visible in the final epiphany with the ghost mother and Mrs. Tolland on her deathbed. This scene reveals that the Todd and Tolland women are mirror images of each other who reflect each other’s close bonds and reveal the arbitrary constructedness of the concept of a “foreigner.” Both pairs of women are simultaneously native and foreign to the Dunnet Landing village. The Todd women, in contrast to their community, are open to diversity whereas Mrs. Tolland literally has access to the hearts of the villagers through music. Emotionally, the dichotomy is temporarily dissolved. Rationally, however, the old order has to be reestablished, which is eventually achieved through the accidental burning of the Tolland house. Mrs. Tolland, however, spiritually and practically lives on in New England, in Mrs. Todd’s gardening, in her tale told to the writer who passes it on. Although Mrs. Todd—obviously still fearful of the instrument and its impact—knows that she is the sole heir to the foreign woman’s property, she never takes the guitar to her own house after Mrs. Tolland’s death. She does save a painting, however: “it was a French print of the statue of the Empress Josephine in the Savane at old Fort Royal, in Martinique” (182). This picture represents Mrs. Tolland’s French ancestry (also perhaps her connection to the “magic and sorcery” of the Caribbean [Kuiken 120]), the story’s emphasis on women’s communities, and colonialism. It represents the Caribbean as intersection of the Old and the New World and Martinique as it had been depicted in Lafcadio Hearn’s Martinique Sketches (1890), with which Jewett was familiar at the time (Kuiken 132).

Ultimately, the “foreigner” in Dunnet Landing motivates what I call transculturation. Josephine Donovan offers the idea that Jewett “promotes woman-identified ways of seeing and being” (3). Therefore, women’s practices of and experiences with music and story-telling suggest that “the center of the world is not the site of social dominance but the site of consciousness; it is potentially everywhere and anywhere” (Howard 378). Part of this consciousness is openness and love of the other as a guiding principle. Mrs. Todd appreciates the knowledge of herbs and cooking—also “the art of herbal teaching” (Kuiken 118)—which Mrs. Tolland passes on to her: “‘she had so much information that

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other folks hadn’t. . . . and she made me imagine new things’” (172). Rejection of this transculturation is a loss because, “first, the town loses sight of its own values, and, second, it misses the opportunity to learn from the stranger” (Schrag 192).

While the story affirms women’s bonding, it also criticizes “American imperialist intervention and appropriation” and, through Mrs. Tolland’s premature death, “exposes the unstable afterlives of such gestures” (Walsh 316), which establish an artificial dichotomy that Jewett reveals as constructed. I propose to situate the story and its tension between binaries (nature-culture; Catholicism-Protestantism; body-mind; other-self) on the threshold of a new time. It is with the development of modernism in the early twentieth century that binaries are often dissolved into fragments and multiple perspectives begin to have validity without hierarchy. Binaries, however, are still at work. Yet, the past and the concomitant clinging to clear-cut oppositions have to be critically examined, as the war of the elements in Jewett’s story shows: “‘There’s a roaring high overhead, and a roaring in the deep sea,’ said Mrs. Todd solemnly, ‘and they battle together nights like this’” (159). This is how the nineteenth century finally changes and transitions into the following one.

Carmen Birkle Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany

WORKS CITED

Ammons, Elizabeth. “Jewett’s Witches.” Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett. Ed. Gwen L. Nagel. Boston: Hall, 1984. 165-184. Print.

Anderson, Donald. “Jewett’s ‘Foreigner’ in the Estranged Land of Almira Todd.” Colby Quarterly 38.4 (Dec. 2002): 390-402. Print.

Birkle, Carmen. Migration—Miscegenation—Transculturation: Writing Multicultural America into the Twentieth Century. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004. Print.

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Böhme, Hartmut, and Gernot Böhme. Das Andere der Vernunft: Zur Entwicklung von Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants. 1983. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996. Print.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793. Three Gothic Novels. Ed. Sydney Krause. New York: Library of America, 1998. 229-637. Print.

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Cet article se propose d’analyser “The Foreigner” (1900), nouvelle régionaliste de Sarah Orne Jewett, et en particulier la représentation qui y est faite de la rencontre entre le moi et l’autre. D’un point de vue narratologique, un récit-cadre et une histoire dans l’histoire permettent de dépeindre Mrs. Tolland, une Caribéenne, et sa confrontation avec la communauté de Dunnet Landing, dans le Maine, qui en viendra à la rejeter. À l’occasion d’une scène mêlant chants et danses, les villageois font face à l’inquiétante étrangeté de l’autre qui les habite, et qu’ont réveillée la musique et le corps, empreints d’affects, de l’étrangère. Alors que cette expérience est refoulée par la communauté, qui fuit l’étrangère et son altérité raciale, Mrs. Todd et sa mère continuent de l’épauler et bénéficient de ses connaissances quant à la culture et l’usage des herbes aromatiques et médicinales. Mrs. Todd réconforte également Mrs. Tolland dans ses derniers instants, alors qu’apparaît le fantôme de sa mère, dont la physionomie révèle l’origine ethnique. À travers cette apparition, le parallèle entre les deux couples mère-fille, Todd et Tolland, et l’effondrement de l’opposition binaire entre le moi et l’autre sont rendus manifestes. In fine, la Caribéenne s’est approprié les arts du jardin, de la cuisine et des plantes médicinales. Elle réside dans la peur qu’ont les villageois du péché, de leur propre animalité et de sa pratique supposée de la sorcellerie. Au sein d’une culture de la peur, l’émigration de Mrs. Tolland vers la Nouvelle-Angleterre, sa musique et l’apparition magique du fantôme de sa mère initient un processus de transculturation, ainsi qu’une transition qui fait se succéder aux oppositions binaires et tranchées du xixe siècle les frontières équivoques du xxe siècle.

VIOLENCE IN THE SOUTH: CHARLES W. CHESNUTT’S “THE SHERIFF’S CHILDREN”

As Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) indicates in the beginning of “The Sheriff’s Children” (1889), the story displays the mind of the rural South. The narrator speaks as a historian who characterizes the geographical and historical setting of an incident he is about to tell. It occurred in the small village of Troy, “a hamlet with a population of four or five hundred” (131), county seat of Branson County, North Carolina, whose fictitious name Chesnutt took from Branson Creek in Montgomery County. “No description of the life of any Southern community,” the narrator claims, “would be perfect that failed to emphasize the all pervading influence of the great conflict” (131). Undoubtedly, the Civil War had left its mark even on Branson County, but on the whole it had “slightly disturbed the sluggish current of life in this region, remote from railroads and navigable streams” (131). As the narrator muses, the fact that at the period in question “no railroad had come to Troy” (132) meant that its “social corpse” had not been “galvanized by the fresh blood of civilization that pulses along the farthest ramifications of our great system of commercial highways” (131). Branson County being located “in a sequestered district of one of the staidest and most conservative States of the Union” (131), represents “the most Southern of counties in the most Southern of states,” in short, “the unreconstructed South” (Walcott 83). For Chesnutt, then, the community of Troy metonymically illustrates the dispositions of the traditional rural Southern community, above all, its backwardness and its rootedness in the history of the South.

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CheSnutt’S SoCiologiCal PeRSPeCtive

In 1902, W. E. B. Du Bois praised Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) as “one of the best sociological studies of the Wilmington Riot which I have seen” (210). Announcing an editorial copy of the novel to Isaiah B. Scott in a letter from November 1901, Chesnutt himself pointed out that he intended it to be “both a novel and a political and sociological tract” (Letters 167). In his explanatory essay, “Charles W. Chesnutt’s Own View of His New Story, The Marrow of Tradition” (1901), the author points out that his work “belongs in the category of purpose novels, inasmuch as it seeks to throw light upon the vexed moral and sociological problems which grow out of the presence, in our Southern states, of two diverse races, in nearly equal numbers” (169). As I will argue in the following reading of “The Sheriff’s Children” (published in the New York journal Independent as early as 1889 and reprinted in the collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line in 1899), Chesnutt’s view of the region of the South is sociologically informed as well: “A mulatto himself, one who experienced first hand the sensation of being trapped between two worlds, Chesnutt vacillated between the desire to be considered white and a pride in being identified as Black” (Delmar 375). Apart from the author’s ‘race,’ his perspective on the South, or what Julian Mason called “the realistic and critical boldness of most of his subject matter in the eyes of much of the South,” may well be the reason why the region failed to acknowledge him as a Southern writer (89).

The story proper begins, when one summer morning, “about ten years after the war” (132), one of Troy’s most respected residents, Captain Walker, was found dead, the victim of a murder. The old veteran, known for his “cheery smile” and “good-natured” jokes, had “served in Mexico under Scott, and had left an arm on the field of Gettysburg” (132). Upon the discovery of the crime, the tranquil village suddenly came alive with “intense excitement” (132). A “strange mulatto” (132) who had been observed in the vicinity of Captain Walker’s house, was immediately identified as a suspect, caught by a posse and secured behind the bars of the county jail. In the following, Chesnutt presents the psychosocial processes in a group of male citizens that will bring about the decision to lynch the suspect. The initial excitement about the murder first turns into “a growing sentiment of anger . . . toward the murderer who had . . . cut down their friend,” which then leads to “a strong feeling that ordinary justice was too slight a punishment for such a crime” (133). As Chesnutt emphasizes, it is the emotion of rage that triggers action resulting in an “informal gathering of citizens” (133) in a country store. When the crowd learns that due to the judge’s illness, court cannot be held in the evening and has to be postponed until the following week, disappointment spreads and someone emphatically states that this was the “‘the durndes’, meanes’ murder ever committed in this caounty’” (133). “‘Hangin’,’” another one adjoins, “‘air

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too good fer the murderer, . . . he oughter be burnt, stidier bein’ hung’” (133). At this point, “a jug of moonlight whiskey” (134) is passed among the crowd, followed by the crucial argument uttered by “a round-shouldered farmer, who, in spite of his peaceable expression and faded gray eye, was known to have been one of the most daring followers of a rebel guerrilla chieftain” (134), namely yet another hero of the Civil War. He challenges the others by reminding them of their moral obligation to defend white supremacy: “‘Ef you fellers air gwine ter set down an’ let a wuthless nigger kill the bes’ white man in Branson, an’ not say nuthin’ ner do nuthin’, I’ll move outen the caounty” (134). The narrator’s comment is highly ironic: “Whether the fear of losing the round-shouldered farmer operated to bring about the result or not is immaterial to this narrative; but, at all events, the crowd decided to lynch the negro” (134).

the eStabliShed-outSideR meChaniSm

Drawing on Norbert Elias’s theory of established-outsider relations, the erupting conflict can be analyzed as follows. The juxtaposition of “bes’ white man” and “wuthless nigger” addresses the social constellation responsible for the imminent outbreak of hostility. The farmer’s statement evokes the basic figuration characteristic not only of Troy, but any Southern community, namely the existence of two interdependent groups who from the very beginning of their interactions have shown an uneven balance of power. There is the group of the (white) established, who due to substantial material and social advantages, such as better access to resources and stronger group cohesion, has had the power to define the other group as outsiders. It is important to note with Elias “that members of groups which are, in terms of power, stronger than the other interdependent groups, think of themselves in human terms as better than the others” (“Towards” 1). In the communication between the groups, the “complementarity of group charisma (one’s own) and group disgrace (that of others)” (8) is upheld by various strategies. Owing to the structural power imbalances between the groups, “collective praise- and blame-fantasies” (21) are fabricated and work in favor of the established group. Most importantly, there is what Elias calls “pars pro toto distortion in opposite directions,” according to which “an established group tends to attribute to its outsider group as a whole the ‘bad’ characteristics of that group’s ‘worst’ section – of its anomic minority. In contrast, the self-image of the established group tends to be modelled on its exemplary, most ‘nomic’ or norm-setting section, on the minority of its ‘best’ members” (5).

The farmer’s derogatory statement about the stranger clearly reflects this “pars pro toto distortion.” He thereby appeals to his fellow-members of the established group to reinstate the social order that has been disturbed by the murder of one of its most exemplary members, which was supposedly

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committed by an outsider. In the eyes of the established group, the restoration of the social order is essential; after all, it guarantees not only cherished privileges, but, more importantly, the group’s collective identity as superior human beings. Formerly sustained by the system of slavery, the alleged superior status of whites had been severely threatened since the emancipation of slaves. In this period of anxiety, any specific incident that seemingly confirmed the general threat produced fear in the established group and triggered their desire for retaliation. This forceful psychosocial mechanism is responsible for the crowd’s zeal for immediate violent action. Swiftly, the men appoint a committee in charge of preparing “the lynching party” to start “at five o’clock in the afternoon” (134).

In the next scene, a black man, who overheard the plan, runs to the sheriff’s house and warns him that a group of citizens is approaching the jail with the intention to hang the prisoner. Chesnutt stresses that the lynch mob is led by respectable citizens. To the sheriff’s question, who was coming, Sam reports: “‘Dere’s Mistah McSwayne, en Doc’ Cain, en Maje’ McDonal’, en Kunnel Wright, en a heap er yuthers” (135). Again, the importance of the recent war for the white men of Troy is emphasized. Just like the victim of the murder, Captain Walker, some of the members of the lynching mob are referred to by their former military rank: Major McDonald and Colonel Wright. Even the sheriff listening to Sam’s account “unconsciously assumed the attitude of a soldier who momentarily expects to meet the enemy face to face” (135). Sheriff Campbell’s daughter Polly reacts with great concern, when her father loads his “double-barreled shotgun” and tells her “‘[t]that there is a mob comin’ this way to lynch the nigger we’ve locked up. But they won’t do it,’” he assures her (136).

Before the confrontation between citizens and sheriff unfolds, the narrator provides significant background information regarding the sheriff’s superior social status. He is “a man far above the average of the community in wealth, education, and social position” (136). Not only had he owned economic capital in the form of “large estates and numerous slaves”; he also possessed cultural capital having “graduated at the State University at Chapel Hill,” and due to having “traveled some in his youth” was considered an authority “on all subjects connected with the outer world” (137). In addition, we learn that in the political battle between the North and the South having at first been “an ardent supporter of the Union, he had opposed the secession movement in his native State” (137). As a result, he had joined the Confederate army rather late in the conflict but then served with distinction and rose to the rank of Colonel. “Colonel or Sheriff Campbell, as he was indifferently called, as the military or civil title happened to be most important in the opinion of the person addressing him, had a high sense of the responsibility attaching to his office” (137). Transposed into sociological theory, Campbell acts from the secure position of high status. What in his essay “Further Aspects of Established-Outsider Relations: The Maycomb Model” (1990) Elias maintains

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about Atticus Finch, the lawyer in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, also applies to Chesnutt’s sheriff: “He knew his value; he was not afflicted by a sense of uncertainty about his own value. It is quite characteristic that a person who ranked high in the scale of the social community was one of the few not afflicted by the need to kill what he felt to be . . . a threat to his self-esteem” (224). In other words, given his secure social position, the sheriff could well afford to be a man of principles. And he acts accordingly, when the lynching mob having gathered before the jail demands from the sheriff within “‘to have a talk with the nigger that killed Cap’n Walker’” (138). Not only does he deny this demand, but he announces: “‘I don’t mean to surrender this jail while I’m able to shoot’” (139).

The next scene takes us into the cell on the upper floor of the jail, where the prisoner is kept. The latter expresses both his fear and his innocence to which the sheriff reacts with “mingled contempt and loathing” (139). Yet owing to his sense of duty he not only assures the prisoner that although he will “‘probably be hung sooner or later . . . it shall not be to-day’” if he can help it (139-40), but unfetters him, so that he would be able to fight in case he himself got shot, because, as he argues somewhat cynically, “‘[i]f I’m shot, I’ll consider my responsibility at an end’” (140). While the sheriff focuses on the crowd outside, the prisoner takes hold of the revolver that the sheriff had carelessly placed on a bench next to him. The reason for the sheriff’s negligence is relevant; he obviously shares his group’s blame-fantasies about outsiders: “He had not expected anything of the kind. He had relied on the negro’s cowardice and subordination in the presence of an armed white man as a matter of course” (141). Although Campbell, due to his secure social position, does not feel the need “‘to teach the niggers their places’,” as one of the speakers of the crowd explains the men’s motif (139), he certainly shares their deeply ingrained contempt of blacks. Whereas the strategies of the established group commonly succeed in confirming their higher status, in this case, the sheriff falls victim to the mechanism of established-outsider relations. Having assumed the prisoner’s inferiority, he subsequently finds himself at his mercy.

the SheRiFF’S StRuggle With hiS habituS oF the White SoutheRneR

In the ensuing dramatic battle of words and minds, the prisoner expresses his conviction that in order to get away he has to take the life of the sheriff. When Campbell protests, “‘you would not kill the man to whom you owe your own life’” (143), the prisoner reveals that he indeed owes his life to the sheriff as he is his son Tom born to the slave Cicely, both of whom the plantation owner had sold South—driven at the time, as Campbell regretfully remembers, by a mixture of pecuniary need and momentary anger after a quarrel with Cicely. The sheriff’s reaction to this revelation—“‘Good God! . . . you would not

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murder your own father?’” (144)—is met by the son’s rebuke that the father had not come up to any of his parental obligations, had given him neither his name nor his protection, not to speak of the freedom other white men had given their colored sons. To the father’s objection that the son was free now and moreover, obviously having attended school—a surmise based on the sheriff’s observation “that the mulatto spoke more eloquently and used better language than most Branson County people” (144)—, he could educate himself further, the latter responds with bitterness. He expresses the grim insight of the outsider that, in contrast to his former illusions, “‘no degree of learning or wisdom’” will bring about any change in his social position and that due to the color of his skin he will be condemned to “‘always wear what’”—as he puts it—“‘in my own country is a badge of degradation’” (144). He adds that he did not care for this kind of life and if he yet fought for preserving it, it was the “‘animal’” in him, “‘not the man, that flees the gallows’” (144). However, although he did not think he owed his father anything, he did not want to shoot him and thus asks: “‘Will you promise to give no alarm and make no attempt to capture me until morning, if I do not shoot?’” (144).

At this point of the story, the tables have definitely been turned on the sheriff. If before he appeared as a staunch defender of law and justice, he is now exposed as a representative and profiteer of the inhumane system of slavery. Furthermore, he is not only in the hands of the prisoner, but he faces a moral conundrum having to decide “between his love of life and his sense of duty” (145). The narrator explains the discrepancy between the slaveholder’s callousness in selling his own son and the sheriff’s sense of duty (even in the face of mortal danger) sociologically. The sheriff’s conscience, the narrator concludes, “had merely been warped by his environment” (145), namely, by the corrupting influence of the social conditions of slavery. Chesnutt spares the sheriff “the necessity of a decision” (145) and his son the patricide he is about to commit. When the prisoner announces that he cannot trust the sheriff anyway, raising the pistol to kill him, Polly arrives as dea ex machina, shoots and injures the prisoner. The sheriff bandages the wounded arm of the prisoner, whose “bravado had given place to a stony apathy” (145), promises him to get a doctor in the morning and advises him to stay quiet.

While the sheriff lies awake during the night, he comes to the conclusion that he had not fulfilled the responsibility he owed his son regardless of “law or custom” (146). Feeling pity with the “poor wretch,” he decides to do what was in his power to secure his acquittal and then tries to “atone for his crime against this son of his” (147). Alas, the sheriff’s remorse and his resolve to do justice come too late. In the morning, Campbell finds the prisoner dead: he “had torn the bandage from his wound and bled to death during the night. He had evidently been dead several hours” (148). What Tom had called the “animal” in him—the vital force formerly responsible of fighting for a life he did not even consider worth living—had weakened and had thus led him to

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decide in favor of death. In his essay “Literature in Its Relation to Life” (1899), Chesnutt emphasizes that, in general, humans cling to life “under any burden of misery or disgrace or suffering that may weight it down” (111).

What, then, causes the prisoner in this situation to quench this powerful instinct, although he shortly before had experienced its great strength? Given the fact that in the same essay Chesnutt quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer’s “On the Sufferings of the World” (111; 115, n.9) from Studies in Pessimism (1891), it does not seem too far-fetched to equate the “animal” instinct of survival with the philosopher’s core concept of “the will to live.” It is important to note that to Schopenhauer the denial of the “Will,” the greatest source of our suffering, is a sign of strength, because it liberates us from the deep pain of restless desire. In the light of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, the prisoner’s decision to kill himself would then signify not weakness but ultimate victory. The psychological answer to the question why the former slave who repeatedly had experienced great suffering would at this point prefer to deny the powerful will to live is implied in the difference between the “badge of degradation” that society has forced him to wear and the individual lack of recognition he experiences in his father’s bearing towards him. While he was able to cope with the former, he was not willing to endure the latter.

The sheriff, in turn, is not capable of immediately overcoming the attitude of the white plantation owner, who in the face of “debts, mortgages, and bad crops” (143) would consider his black lover and son first and foremost as property to be sold “‘to the rice swamps’” (144). At no time during the dialogue between the two men does the father call his son by his name; nor does he address him as his son. It is the narrative technique of narrated monologue which permits the narrator “to glide in and out” of the character’s mind “adopting his protagonist’s inner language at crucial moments, but always free to return to his objective narrative base, to describe minutely the protagonist’s actions and surroundings” (Cohn 117) that reveals the sheriff’s distanced attitude. He still thinks of his son as “the mulatto,” even when he contemplates the latter’s parentage: “He had not doubted, could not doubt, the mulatto’s word. He knew whose passions coursed beneath that swarthy skin and burned in the black eyes opposite his own. He saw in this mulatto what he himself might have become had not the safeguards of parental restraint and public opinion been thrown around him” (144). The sheriff recognizes “the mulatto’s” passion in himself. “Campbell had always lived by the code of Southern aristocracy, one which sanctioned his behavior toward his lover and child. But he had never consciously realized that he was using the code to mask his instincts from himself” (Delmar 367). Moreover, as the sheriff’s skin color is described as “of a ruddier complexion than is usual among Southerners” (135), the phrase that he “saw in this mulatto what he himself might have become” also seems to suggest that he himself is the distant offspring of a miscegenation that had been kept a secret. In any case, Campbell does not offer the slightest

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gesture of apology, when the son confronts him with the fate of his mother, who “‘died under the lash’” (144), or when he evokes the miseries of his own life. And both in prison and later at home the father fails to disclose the identity of the prisoner to his daughter, notwithstanding Polly’s numerous questions. The father still follows the code of Southern aristocracy and keeps his children separate. Thus, in the end, the sheriff, who bravely saved the prisoner from the physical violence of the lynch mob, becomes responsible for the death of his son after all—by exerting the symbolic violence of disrespect, confirming his son’s pessimistic prediction that he will “‘always wear . . . a badge of degradation’” (144).

The author’s sociological viewpoint gains complexity and poignancy through the issue of miscegenation that he illustrates with the publicly unacknowledged relation of the slave owner and his colored son conceived with a slave, or, what Chesnutt provocatively identifies as “slavery and polygamy, . . . our twin relics of barbarism” (“Race Problem” 202). To this he adds yet another twist by turning the former master into the representative of the state in the post-bellum era. In the confrontation with the lynching mob, the sheriff proves himself a morally firm, staunch defender of the law. Yet, confronted with his son, the father persists in the white person’s feelings of superiority. While the abolition of slavery assuages the stark power imbalance between masters and slaves, the basic structure of the established-outsider figuration remains intact.

For example, participation in the established group’s charisma depends on “the avoidance of any closer social contact with” outsiders, and therefore the sheriff’s “identity as a member of the superior group” (Elias, “Towards” 9) does not allow him to acknowledge his black son. Thus, he does not even reveal to his daughter that the person she shot was her step-brother; and when he later contemplates helping his son, his plan does not involve any official recognition. The sheriff exhibits, then, the collective habitus of the white Southern community. Habitus, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu, is “embodied history,” namely, “the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product” (56). It is therefore characterized by “inertia, the dead weight, of preconceived opinions” (222), as Chesnutt put it in the essay “Race Prejudice” (1905). While Chesnutt often argues in terms of conscious prejudice, he also seems to be aware of the unconscious, embodied forces responsible for the slowness of change: “Slavery existed long after the essential moral and economic evils of the system were clearly recognized. Old and discredited beliefs, entrenched by privilege and power, still keep their grip upon large masses of mankind” (223; my emphasis). When slavery was abolished, Chesnutt claims in “Rights and Duties” (1908), “[t]he system was destroyed, in theory; and a new one laid down. But human nature was not changed, nor were habits and customs greatly altered” (256). Moreover, he even addresses the role of habit and custom behind the tendency of naturalizing our behavior: “This natural conservatism

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is rooted in many things: in habit—we keep on doing injurious things because others do them; . . . The relation of master and slave no longer exists, though that of employer and servant is still very imperfectly adjusted, and the customs of slavery die hard” (“Race Prejudice” 223-24).

the didaCtiC taSk oF FiCtion

To Chesnutt, writing fiction was above all a means to educate not so much black people, but whites. “Through the medium of dramatic narrative” (Marrow xxxix), he wanted to teach whites about the injustice of caste:

The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites,—for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism—I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people; and I would be one of the first to head a determined organized crusade against it. (Journals 139-40)

In “The Sheriff’s Children,” Chesnutt is careful to preserve the black man’s agency and dignity, at the same time that he demonstrates how, at the end of the brief era of Reconstruction, the legacy of slavery catches up with the Southern community and its self-righteous representative of the law. The sheriff’s belated remorse serves an important didactic purpose. In the course of the narration, the attention increasingly focuses on the sheriff’s thinking and feeling. The extradiegetic narrator no longer offers his comments. As it is gliding deeper into the protagonist’s mind, the narrated monologue induces us to follow the sheriff’s gradual change of attitude. In the end, the author withdraws all narrative guidance: neither narrator nor focalizer comment on the death of the prisoner. It is completely left to the reader to find out the meaning of what is stated matter-of-factly in the story’s last two sentences: “The prisoner had torn the bandage from his wound and bled to death during the night. He had evidently been dead several hours” (148). The silence of the narrative instances offers “a cognitive, emotional, and ethical third space in which readers are invited to rethink their own concepts and beliefs” (Basseler 86). To do so necessarily presupposes to put oneself in the situation of the prisoner and thus to empathize with him. As pointed out above, Chesnutt’s focalizer, the sheriff, is like Atticus Finch an individual whose “secure position . . . made it easier for him to emphathise with outsiders” (Elias, “Maycomb Model” 224). Yet, in contrast to Atticus Finch, it takes the sheriff time to overcome his prejudices and reach a state of empathy. Such deferment enhances the potential success of Chesnutt’s didactic experiment addressed to the readership of the New York magazine Independent, which “then catered

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to an educated, liberal white audience” (Selke 25). The author could assume that these readers would most likely share Campbell’s point of view and, prompted by the narrative technique, might even come to share the sheriff’s shift of stance towards the mulatto, thus being able to recognize “the unjust spirit of caste.” When in 1880 Chesnutt contemplates to become a writer, he reflects on the task ahead: “The work is of a twofold character. The negro’s part is to prepare himself for social recognition and equality; and it is the province of literature to open the way for him to get it—to accustom the public mind to the idea; and . . . while amusing them to . . . lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling” (Journals 140). Obviously, “The Sheriff’s Children” testifies to Chesnutt’s attempt to realize his idea of the cultural work of literature.

CheSnutt’S StanCe againSt SoutheRn Plantation liteRatuRe

Chesnutt’s novels and short stories with a Southern setting differ considerably from nineteenth-century Southern fiction. He writes against the tradition of the plantation literature that glorifies the Old South by celebrating the “aristocratic” Southern style of life and its paternalism. In contrast, it is above all the vicious legacy of slavery, the effects of unacknowledged slaveholding miscegenation (Sundquist 392), as well as the injustices of Jim Crow legislation and the epidemic of lynching that to Chesnutt characterize, or rather, as he puts it in “Rights and Duties,” “disgrace” (253) the South. As much as he “shrink[s] from the sordid and brutal, often unconsciously brutal side of Southern life” (Letters 213), he feels a moral obligation to disclose it in his writings. Rather than appropriating the nostalgia of the plantation myth, Chesnutt employs a sociological perspective, which by addressing the social conditions of human interaction characteristic of Southern culture, reveals inconvenient truths about Southern society.

Consequently, while Southern dialect literature usually concentrates on black vernacular, in “The Sheriff’s Children” Chesnutt uses dialect not as a marker of race but as a means of class distinction. Both, white and black citizens of Troy speak dialect, and although the author carefully distinguishes between white and black variants, it is of greater significance that in contrast to his fellow citizens the sheriff speaks standard English, sometimes mixed with colloquialisms, especially when he addresses the crowd; so does his daughter and more importantly, as mentioned above, the sheriff observes that his son “spoke more eloquently and used better language than most Branson County people” (144). “It is clearly the author’s intent to link the members of the sheriff’s family through their speech, a sort of crude leitmotif which allows the reader to understand relationships long before they are stated” (Haslem 24).

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Chesnutt also avoids descriptions of the beautiful scenery of Southern landscapes or depictions of the lush nature so typical of Southern literature. In his choice of setting, he instead focuses on the social function of space. In “The Sheriff’s Children,” for example, there are three prominent sites, the country store serving as a kind of unofficial town hall, where the community meets and deliberates, then the house of the representative of law, in which the sheriff may act both as an official and a private person, and finally the jail, where commonly individuals suspected of having broken the law are kept in custody, but where, in this case, a prisoner is granted sanctuary, defended against a lynching mob by a sheriff who takes his office seriously. Likewise, the geographical remoteness stressed by the narrator in the beginning must be understood as symbolizing a backwardness of the region with regard to the social question of the Negro. Although Chesnutt was not blind to the more subtle racism of the North, he was convinced, as he wrote in 1905, that “the North now is at least a century in advance of the South in its attitude toward the Negro” (“Race Prejudice” 217).

The most important aspect of Chesnutt’s sociological perspective on the South, however, is his concept of ‘race.’ As he states in the essay “Race Prejudice”: “I do not believe that the current notion of race has any logical or scientific ground, or that it is, in its essence, a matter of very much importance; as a fact it is extremely important” (214-15). That he regarded the notion of ‘race’ as a social and legal construct and understood that, as such, it was completely arbitrary, becomes obvious in his article “What Is a White Man?” Like “The Sheriff’s Children,” which in a letter to Albion W. Tourgée Chesnutt called “a Southern Story, dealing with a tragic incident, not of slavery exactly, but showing the fruits of slavery” (Letters 44), the essay was first published in the Independent in 1889. In it, Chesnutt discusses the different color lines and miscegenation laws of the Southern states. Whereas the various legal definitions of who is to be considered “white,” respectively “colored,” are founded on the portion of “Negro blood” in their ancestry, Chesnutt points out that in practice it is often a distinction based on social categories: “The extension of the color-line to places of public entertainment and resort, to inns and public highways, is in most states entirely a matter of custom” (“What Is a White Man?” 71). Chesnutt’s supposition resembles very much, Du Bois’s ingenious definition: “[T]he black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia” (77).

the diSFRanChiSement oF aFRiCan ameRiCanS in the South

As the short story “The Sheriff’s Children” demonstrates, Chesnutt understands that the self-assurance of white Southerners has declined “from the loss of economic and political power suffered by the South in the aftermath of the war” (Sundquist 425) and from the subsequent breakdown of the social

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order, which before the war had guaranteed them a secure and high social status. Consequently, the established group interprets the murder of one of its war heroes by what it considers a despicable, if not subhuman outsider as a serious assault on white supremacy, which needs to be avenged. In this situation, the members of the established group respect neither the principle of due process of the law nor the state monopoly of violence but instead try to take the law in their own hands, because to them this appears as the only way justice can be served adequately. Chesnutt condemns extra-judicial executions, for example, in his essay “The Disfranchisement of the Negro” (1903). The colored people, he claims, “have no direct representation in any Southern legislature, and no voice in determining the choice of white men who might be friendly to their rights;” as a consequence, “day after day the catalogue of lynchings and anti-Negro riots upon every imaginable pretext, grows longer and more appalling” (“Disfranchisement” 182). Like other African Americans at the time, the journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, for example, Chesnutt refuted the common Southern justification of the ongoing oppression of the black population. In “Age of Problems” (1906), a speech delivered to the Cleveland Council of Sociology, Chesnutt invents a dispute, in which a “Southern apologist for suppression” (247) fears the destruction of “[o]ur civilization” on the basis that “the Negroes are ignorant. They are criminal. They are lustful. They are fundamentally and hopelessly inferior. And they are unreasonably aspiring. . . . Only by the strong hand of repression can they be kept in their proper position of subordination” (241). Chesnutt clearly saw the interrelation between the social rise of the black population and the growing aggression of whites towards blacks. As he writes in the essay “The Future American” (1900), “the outbreaks of race prejudice in recent years are the surest evidence of the Negro’s progress” (134). In his short story, Chesnutt avoids the motif of rape, which often served as a disguise of political and economic grievances.

Male hysteria was not primarily about rape. . . . Rape was the mask behind which disfranchisement was hidden, but it was part of the larger charade of plantation mythology that set out to restore southern pride and revive a paradigm of white manliness that the legacy of the war and the economic and political rise of blacks during Reconstruction had called seriously into question. (Sundquist 425)

By choosing the murder of a war veteran as the crime of which the white men of Troy accuse “the mulatto,” Chesnutt uncovers the true anxieties behind their desire for revenge. Unsparingly, “The Sheriff’s Children” discloses the psychosocial causes of the violence exerted by Southern whites; not surprisingly, it has been called “one of Chesnutt’s most bitter stories” (Heermance 164).

Chesnutt’s claim that The Marrow of Tradition was a “purpose novel” can be transposed to the narrative of “The Sheriff’s Children.” Like the novel,

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the short story “seeks to throw light upon the vexed moral and sociological problems which grow out of the presence, in our Southern states, of two diverse races” (Chesnutt, “Chesnutt’s Own View” 169). “The Sheriff’s Children” by concentrating on one family’s singular confrontation with the color line makes excellent use of the genre whose “brevity and episodic structure . . . privilege the depiction of processes of transition, threshold situations and fleeting moments of crisis or decision” (Achilles 41). Chesnutt, as “a social crusader” (Heermance 78), tried to employ the short story as “a privileged terrain for scenarios of reorientation” (Achilles 41). However, since he also insisted on speaking the truth about the physical and symbolic violence white Southerners exerted under the systems of slavery and Jim Crow, his didactic experiments conducted in medium of Southern fiction were doomed to fail in his time.

Christa Buschendorf Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany

WORKS CITED

Achilles, Jochen. “Modes of Liminality in American Short Fiction: Condensations of Multiple Identities.” Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing. Eds. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. 35-49. Print.

Basseler, Michael. “Cognitive Liminality: On the Epistemology of the Short Story.” Liminality and the Short Story. Eds. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. 77-91. Print.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Print.

Chesnutt, Charles W. “Age of Problems.” 1906. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 238-52. Print.

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---. “Charles W. Chesnutt’s Own View of His New Story, The Marrow of Tradition.” 1901. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 169-70. Print.

---. “The Disfranchisement of the Negro.” 1903. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 179-95. Print.

---. “The Future American.” 1900. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 121-36. Print.

---. The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Durham, London: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

---. “Literature in Its Relation to Life.” 1899. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 109-16. Print.

---. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Norton & Co., 2012. Print.

---. “Race Prejudice: Its Causes and Its Cures.” 1905. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 214-38. Print.

---. “The Race Problem.” 1904. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 196-205. Print.

---. “Rights and Duties.” 1908. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 252-62. Print.

---. “The Sheriff’s Children.” Stories, Novels, and Essays. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: The Library of America, 2002. 131-48. Print.

---. “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1889-1905. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz III. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.

---. “What Is a White Man?” 1889. Essays and Speeches. Eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, Jesse S. Crisler. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 68-73. Print.

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Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978. Print.

Delmar, P. Jay. “The Mask as Theme and Structure: Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘The Sheriff’s Children’ and ‘The Passing of Grandison.’” American Literature 51.3 (Nov. 1979): 364-75. Print.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

Elias, Norbert. “Further Aspects of Established-Outsider Relations: The Maycomb Model.” 1990. The Established and the Outsiders. Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson. 1965. The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, vol. 4. Ed. Cas Wouters. Dublin: U College Dublin P, 2008. 209-31. Print.

---. “Towards a Theory of Established-Outsider Relations.” 1976. The Established and the Outsiders. Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson. 1965. The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, vol. 4. Ed. Cas Wouters. Dublin: U College Dublin P, 2008. 1-36. Print.

Haslem, Gerald W. “’The Sheriff’s Children’: Chesnutt’s Tragic Racial Parable.” Negro American Literature Forum 2.2 (Summer 1968): 21-26. Print.

Heermance, J. Noel. Charles W. Chesnutt: America’s First Great Black Novelist. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1974. Print.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960. Print.

Mason, Julian D., Jr. “Charles W. Chesnutt as Southern Author.” Mississippi Quarterly 20.2 (Spring 1967): 77-89. Print.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays. Trans. T. Bailey Saunders. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1891. Print.

Selke, H. K. “Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘The Sheriff’s Children.’” The Black American Short Story in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Peter Bruck. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977. 21-38. Print.

Walcott, Ronald. “Chesnutt’s ‘The Sheriff’s Children’ As Parable.” Negro American Literature Forum 7.3 (Fall 1973): 83-85. Print.

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À partir d’une lecture attentive de la nouvelle de Chesnutt intitulée “The Sheriff’s Children” et de ses essais, on remarque que pour Chestnutt, le Sud rural du milieu des années 1870 est une région dont la population blanche se trouve aux prises avec son passé esclavagiste et avec l’humiliation de sa défaite après la guerre de Sécession. Chesnutt réfute la tradition de la littérature sur les plantations du Vieux Sud et dépeint au contraire avec force détails l’ordre social de la petite communauté sudiste. En se concentrant sur son shérif actuel et son fils “mulâtre” non reconnu, Chesnutt révèle les mécanismes psychosociaux qui se cachent derrière les actions de ses personnages. En s’inspirant de la théorie de Norbert Elias sur les relations établies avec l’extérieur, cette contribution affine la perspective de Chesnutt et le lit comme un sociologue averti avant la lettre.

THE WHITE MAN’S MEDICAL BURDEN: U.S. COLONIALISM AND DISEASE ECOLOGIES

IN JACK LONDON’S HAWAI’IAN STORIES

living ConneCtionS: ameRiCan emPiRe and Colonial eCologieS

This paper is about literary regionalism, and yet, geographically, but also physically and mentally, it moves far away from Sarah Orne Jewett’s quaint New England scenery—as far away, in fact, as was then possible. Its focus is on Hawai’i and more especially on Jack London’s Hawai’ian stories. When these stories were written, during the first decade of the twentieth century, the Hawai’ian archipelago had just recently become part of the unfolding American empire. In a corporate coup d’état, instigated by James Dole and other U.S.-American entrepreneurs, the Kingdom of Hawai’i had been overthrown, Queen Lili’uokalani deposed and a business- and America-friendly government installed—which government quickly called in U.S. military to protect their interests. The newly established Republic of Hawai’i was but short-lived and a mere stepping stone to the annexation of the islands by the United States a few years later, in 1898.

It is important not to forget the larger geopolitical context in which these events, far removed from the American mainland, were making eminent sense. This was the time of the Spanish-American War, which not only brought Cuba under U.S.-American influence but turned the United States into a global imperial player with the military acquisition of the Philippines. This was also the Strenuous Age of Theodore Roosevelt, his Rough Riders and an overall

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ideological re-affirmation of robust maleness. 1 These two developments were not only interlinked but would, as I hope to show, play themselves out in distinctive ways on Hawai’i and the fictional world of London’s stories. My approach here might well be identified as an expanded political economy reading—expanded, because it adds to Friedrich Engels’ famous definition (in the Anti Dühring of 1877-78) an ecological dimension. Engels defined political economy as a form of knowledge “about the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society.” I think it is empirically but also conceptually arguable that the means of subsistence Engels is speaking of here are determined no less by the respective local ecologies, the climate, the vegetation, which taken together, produce living connections—living understood here in the double sense of conditions that affect human living and which themselves have to be lived through. Such connections then formed the unavoidable material conditions under which Americans—businessmen, missionaries and the military—acted in the pursuit of their imperialist projects.

Diseases were also part of this overall framework and should not be put aside. While the archipelago was seen by many as a valuable acquisition to the American empire, especially in geo-strategic terms, others were sounding more cautionary, even alarming notes. The principal reason for this was Hawai’i’s notorious disease ecology: 2 the idyllic Pacific islands were known to be infested with leprosy. Leprosy, or, more correctly, Hansen’s disease, is one of the oldest

1. The multilayered links and determinations between U.S. colonialism and white mascu-linity—perceived as endangered by women’s suffrage movements and the overall greater presence of women in the public sphere—have been systematically explored by Warwick Anderson. As Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier closed, he argues, “a new one opened up on the other side of the Pacific, one markedly more militarized and medical. In the crucible of the Philippines ‘borderlands,’ American whiteness and masculinity would again be refashio-ned . . .” (42). Although the focus here is on the Philippines, much the same can be said about the Hawai’ian colony. A theoretically nuanced argument on the “biopolitics of empire” can be found in Neel Ahuja’s chapter on the annexation of Hawai’i (vii; 29-70).2. Ecology will be understood here in its original broad sense as the “study of the interrelationships between living organisms and their environment,” the sum total of the relations of organic life—including human life—with its physical surroundings (Lincoln, Boxshall and Clark, “Ecology”). A significant part of these relations is made up of encounters with biologically active materials, often of a pathogenic nature, such as bacteria, microbes, or viruses. These encounters are the result of the never-ending movement of biological materials from place to place, at times assisted by carriers, respectively vectors, human or animal, at others wholly independent. And while the mobility of bio-parts may for the most part be invisible, its effects can be momentous, as when it generates disease ecologies. These specific ecologies are at the center of a new field of environ-mental science research. According to the definition given by the National Research Council, “[t]he challenge is to understand ecological and evolutionary aspects of infectious diseases; develop an understanding of the interactions among pathogens, hosts/receptors, and the environment; and thus to make it possible to prevent changes in the infectivity and virulence of organisms that threaten plant, animal, and human health at the population level” (National Research Council 3).

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known maladies. 3 It is mildly contagious, with visible symptoms including the notorious because disfiguring lumps of fleshy tissue called granulomas. As the disease progresses, people lose the ability to experience bodily pain and become subject to multiple injuries resulting oftentimes in the loss of limbs.

Perhaps partly because of its dramatic symptomology, leprosy was never limited to a medical condition, however serious. Like other contagious diseases it was, and to a certain extent still is, a “myth system[s] waiting to become a political language” (Haraway 181). On Hawai’i, leprosy did produce a biopolitics of location. Historically, this biopolitics goes back to the first moments of colonial contact: it had its roots among American missionaries—themselves important agents in the subsequent systematic and relentless Americanization of the islands. These missionaries were the first non-Hawai’ian observers to note the prevalence of leprosy among the indigenous Polynesian population. Yet they were also the first to make the connection between disease ecology and indigenous population, between “place” and “race,” as they might have put it, and they did so in what might be called “narratives of blame.” As one missionary reported in 1821, “the heathen around us are wasting away by disease, induced not by the climate, but by their imprudence and vices” (“Mission to the Sandwich Islands,” 1821; qtd. in Herman 271). Statements such as these, which would in later years become part of the collective colonial “wisdom,” remind us that in Hawai’i and elsewhere diseases, and especially contagious diseases, mark moments of critical intercultural encounter—critical, because diseases have proven to be powerful media which render human beings differentially present, at times even highly visibly different, and thus vulnerable, in the public sphere.

Until well into the twentieth century, leprosy could not be cured. The only available means to control the disease was to quarantine the afflicted, for which purpose a “leper colony” was established in 1866 at Kalaupapa, on the island of Moloka’i, a part of the archipelago that was sparsely populated and of little commercial interest to white colonizers—haoles, as the Polynesians called them. This “colony,” yet another inside the larger U.S. colony of Hawai’i, was certainly a “total institution” (11) in Erving Goffman’s sense. It too was “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time together lead an enclosed formally administered round of life . . . in the same place and under the same single authority” (17)—in this case a combined medical-colonial authority.

In due time, the Kalaupapa leper colony would achieve world-wide notoriety, due in part to the self-sacrificing philanthropic work of Father

3. Hansen’s disease is now the generally accepted term for this pathological condition. Since leprosy was the term in use in Jack London’s time and the one appearing in his stories, it will here be retained for convenience.

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Damien, a Catholic missionary from Belgium who provided medical care for the patients and lived among them until he himself succumbed to the disease in 1889. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Father Damien (1899) is a moving and widely read tribute. In the view of his contemporaries, Damien’s selfless engagement for the lepers represented the very best in the tradition of Western colonialism and its dedication to care for and uplift the “darker races.” This reminds us that colonialism often spoke in the language of health, so that shouldering the medical burden was most often perceived as part and parcel of the overall White Man’s burden. Health in the burgeoning U.S. empire thus became a “‘civilizing’ project—a ‘nation-building’ program . . .” (Anderson 47).

Diseases, whatever their specific etiology, mounted a most serious, if not the most serious challenge to such projects. On Hawai’i, the indigenous body became, and for a long time remained, a problem for U.S. colonizers. Apart from the debate in medical journals, narratives, factual or fictional, would be an important medium in which these challenges would come up for public debate. In the case of the Hawai’ian colony, the connection between leprosy and the indigenous population would in the following years be affirmed and re-affirmed on a social and political level, but also in sensationalist travel narratives, such as Charles Warren Stoddard’s The Lepers of Molokai (1885) or Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, “The Bottle Imp” (1891). One of the most authoritative contributions to the genre came from the medical profession, more precisely from Alfred B. Mouritz, a long-time resident doctor on Hawai’i:

It is a most pitiable condition, evident to the most unobserving, that an atmosphere of leprosy clings to and surrounds the unfortunate Hawaiian. Why? Because he fails to realize the danger that menaces him, apart from the extreme receptivity of his system to the bacillus of leprosy . . . this being an undeniable fact, then he is the weak link in our chain of national defense. (qtd. in Ahuja 29)

Mouritz’s undeniable credentials as a medical doctor with on-site experience made him a leading voice in a public debate which “constructed bacterial infection [of leprosy] as a central problem in the relationship between island and mainland” (Ahuja 30). No wonder, then, that in 1897 the American magazine The Cosmopolitan asked with noticeable concern “Shall We Annex Leprosy?” (Shaw). In other words, problems were induced by the disease concerning the management of distance between the Hawai’ian colonial space and the U.S. mainland, as well as between indigenous Hawai’ians and white colonizers. At the same time, it also worked to create a stable and fear-ridden link in the public mind between the tropical paradise and leprosy’s “horror of this living death” (qtd. in Ahuja 48). In epidemiological terms, then, but also in the public mind, Hawai’i had come to figure as a “contact zone,” not just in Mary Louise Pratt’s sense but, more importantly, in the sense of a zone where pathogenic biotic material would produce contacts between Americans and the

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indigenous population—contacts which were both undesirable and, at least to a certain extent, unavoidable.

There is a gendered dimension to all of this. On Hawai’i, but also in other locations of the emerging U.S. empire, fears of contagion became a serious factor in the public determining to no small degree the “imperial constitution of colonial masculinity” (Mrinalini Sinha qtd. in Anderson 132). Diseases like leprosy were perceived as putting that masculinity under a constant siege in the tropics, where Sinha, as an American medical doctor on a tour of duty in the Philippines, complained that “low tropical savages are the fittest for their environment, and the strenuous white man is the unfit” (Sinha qtd. in Anderson 138).

Leprosy on Hawai’i thus made a difference and in turn produced a host of further differences: it became one of the “anxieties of affluence” (Buck-Morss 25), bringing home to American colonizers the lesson of how intimately “expansion” (of the American empire) was linked with “exposure” to new, potentially dangerous diseases. What could make Americans rich, could also make them sick.

viSitoR to a Colonial ‘PaRadiSe’: JaCk london on haWai’i

This is, in admittedly very broad sketches, the context in which Jack London’s Hawai’ian short stories were written and in which they function. London and his wife Charmian arrived in Honololu in May of 1907. Hawai’i was the first stop on a planned cross-Pacific tour on board their yacht The Snark. During their five-month visit to the islands, Charmian and Jack were treated royally, quite literally so: they were received by the deposed Hawai’ian royal family and moved around in the company of a set of admirers. In addition, they were granted permission by the Hawai’ian Board of Health to make a visit to the leper colony at Kalaupapa on Moloka’I (see Hornung).

Permissions to visit the station were hardly ever given. One might speculate here that in making an exception for London the Hawai’ian Board of Health was hoping a famous writer’s gift with words would dispel—in their view—the unfortunate association of Hawai’i with a dreaded disease. Next to sugar, leprosy was indeed the principal association in the public mind when it came to Hawai’i and the business community might well have hoped to divert the attention of the American public toward the economic prospects the newly acquired colonies seemed to offer. In this respect, sugar was a convenient cipher and London a convenient mouthpiece.

And London did not disappoint them. In his report, “The Lepers of Molokai’i” (1908), the writer records among other items his Fourth of July visit to what he calls “a happy colony” (qtd. in Tayman 203)—“happy,” because as a feel-good leper station, Kalaupapa combined medical prudence

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with benevolent paternalism. 4 Whether his piece idealizes inordinately the conditions at Kalaupapa in order to “incorporate [its] patient[s] into U.S. imperial designs,” as one reader argues (Ahuja 52), 5 is difficult to determine. To be sure, lepers and leprosy were not London’s only concerns during his sojourn in the tropical “paradise.” Through a number of guided tours, he and his wife became familiar with the political economy of the colony. A visit to the EWA sugar plantation on Oahu, one of the biggest American enterprises on the island, offered new evidence for the exploitative character of capitalism in the tropics.

While such experiences did not register in London’s writings as much as the contact with leprosy did, his texts are pervaded by a noticeable ambivalence toward lepers and leprosy, and it is this ambivalence that will be explored in more detail in the following reading of two of London’s fictional Hawai’ian stories.

“koolau the lePeR” oR, the legend oF the vaniShing PolyneSian

The first example is “Koolau the Leper,” a story published in December of 1909. London opens his narrative with what seems to be a counter-hegemonic gesture, letting a native Hawai’ian speak: “‘Because we are sick they take away our liberty. We have obeyed the law. We have done no wrong. And yet they would put us in prison. Molokai is a prison. . . . It is the will of the white men who rule the land’” (135). This voice belongs to the story’s protagonist, Koolau, the leader of a band of leper outlaws, as one might call them, who have retreated into the remote cliffs and valleys of the island of Kaua’i to escape their deportation to Kalaupapa. Eventually, the group is hunted down by the police and, one by one, the lepers are shot or fall from the cliffs, until only Koolau is left. The rest of the narrative shows him taking his last stand. The story is a thinly disguised fictionalization of a moment of native resistance, well-known at the time: the case of Kaluaiko’olau’, a leper who, like his fictional counterpart, violently resisted his deportation. His story, told by his wife, had been published prior to Jack London’s arrival, but only in native Hawai’ian. An English translation would not become available until 2001.

“Koolau the Leper” easily lends itself to a postcolonial reading, a bit too easily, perhaps. It has all the ingredients postcolonial criticism is usually looking for. It gives a voice to the subaltern and even portrays him as resistant,

4. In retrospect, Charmian London offers a more somber perspective on the leper colony. Watching a group of lepers, she notes that they looked like “a funeral procession in which the dead themselves walked” (118-19).5. Taking a more welcoming position, Alfred Hornung argues that London used his popularity to act as “advocate for the disenfranchised indigenous population” (169, my translation).

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which in addition makes it possible to insert a genealogy of U.S.-American colonialism on Hawai’i:

They [the white colonizers] came like lambs, speaking softly. . . . They were of two kinds. The one kind asked our permission, our gracious permission, to preach to us the word of God. The other kind asked our permission, our gracious permission, to trade with us. That was the beginning. To-day all the islands are theirs, all the land, all the cattle—everything is theirs. (135)

While this description sits well with London’s anti-capitalist sentiments, his attitude toward the colonial subaltern in this story turns out to be more ambivalent. Soon after the passage just quoted, the narrator provides a first full-scale description of Koolau’s band:

They were creatures who once had been men and women. But they were men and women no longer. They were monsters—in face and form grotesque caricatures of everything human. They were hideously maimed and distorted, and had the seeming of creatures that had been racked in millenniums [sic] of hell. (136)

What is first remarkable about a description such as this is its indebtedness to prior American literary renderings of the infra- or subhuman. There is even a dose of melodrama to be found here, as the visible markers of leprosy create a semiotic system spelling medical and moral evil for those who bear the marks. Incongruously, the Christian version of the netherworld is evoked. More important is London’s exclusive reliance on the register of indigenous sub-humanity: there is not in the story a single native Hawai’ian in sound health. 6 All are “apelike travesties” (137) or products of “some mad god at play in the machinery of life” (136).

If one looks at the representational economy of the “Koolau” story, one cannot help noticing a curious duality, much like that between the colonizers and the colonized. It gives the latter a voice, to be sure, but the impact of this potentially emancipatory gesture is quickly muted when, in the descriptive sections of the narrative, Hawai’ian lepers are shown to be little more than a “mass of human wreckage” (136). One might even call this a clever narrative division of labor, which makes it possible for London to exploit the dramatic potential of leprosy and of Koolau’s rebellion while at the same time relegating them to the fringes of human existence. London’s Hawai’ians are all “men and women beyond the pale” (135) whose illness spells out their end and the victory of the White man. And this clearly works against the subversive potential of the story’s opening.

6. At the time of London’s visit a maximum of 8,000 Hawai’ians were interned, three percent of their total number (Ahuja 33).

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Instead, there is an ideological move underlying London’s narrative, one we know only too well from other subalterns in U.S.-American history, for example from James Fenimore Cooper and the complex image of the “Vanishing American.” Here and there, the tensions of intercultural encounter are softened, if not resolved by making one of the partners disappear as if by magic—in London’s case, through the agency of a deadly disease. Leprosy, as the native Hawai’ians’ patrimony, foreordains them to death and disappearance, and so Koolau’s fate can be read allegorically as projecting the larger scheme of the inevitable triumph of U.S.-American colonialism.

ameRiCan viRility beSieged: “the SheRiFF oF kona”

In the second example, “The Sheriff of Kona,” leprosy is no longer a native Hawai’ian characteristic. The dreaded disease has crossed the colonial divide, when Lyte Gregory, of “‘straight American stock’” (123) and much-admired he-man sheriff of the Kona coast of Hawai’i has himself become a leper. London here chooses to dwell in the realm of exception, as leprosy among Caucasians was generally considered an anomaly. White people afflicted were treated differently by the authorities: most notably, they were not forcibly quarantined at the Moloka’i station. London, however, does not focus on this “race”-based difference or its racist and culturalist implications. Instead, his story presents us with a model example of “splendid virile energy”—in the words of then U.S. Secretary of War Elihu Root (qtd. in Anderson 52)—put under strain. His story gives us a protagonist

‘of a different race from ordinary, ailing mortals. He [Lyte Gregory] was a lordly being, untouched by common ills and misfortunes. . . . And then it happened. The mark of the beast was laid upon him. I watched it for a year. It broke my heart. But he did not know it, nor did anybody else guess it except that cursed hapa-haole, Stephen Kaluna. He knew it . . . Stephen Kaluna had developed the leper eye. The disease ran strong in his family, and four or five of his relatives were already on Molokai. (127)

In a barroom brawl, Kaluna, this leper-in-waiting, accuses the sheriff of hiding his own leprosy from the public. That the moment of Aristotelian anagnorisis, of exposure and discovery, should be left to a “half-caste” is a fictional gesture not uncommon in U.S.-American literature, especially when, as Betsy Erkkilä and other scholars of mixed-race studies have shown, ethnic doubling and hybridity are seen as subverting the foundations of a “true-blood” American identity. This issue certainly became more pressing later in the context of American empire building and would certainly warrant a separate reading which, however, will not be attempted here. The rest of the story is anti-climactic and quickly told.

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Sheriff Gregory does stand up to the challenge the disease presents to him, and once the diagnosis is officially confirmed, he turns himself over to the authorities and voluntarily goes to the Mokoka’i colony from which, however, he is soon “rescued” by his friends, who shoo him away to a new life in Japan.

Literary Naturalism, as Winfried Fluck has noted, is essentially concerned with “existential snapshots” (202, my translation); and this is what London is offering here in the format of the short story. Still, aside from this personal dimension, there is a collective, colonialist one that is not exhausted by pointing out the issue of double standards in the treatment of a tropical disease. This dimension is already obvious at the opening, when a local resident tells the story to an unidentified visitor to Hawai’i:

“You cannot escape liking the climate,” Cudworth [the storyteller’s host] said, in reply to my panegyric on the Kona coast. . . .

We had finished dinner, which had been served on the big lanai, the one with a northerly exposure, though exposure is indeed a misnomer in so delectable a climate.

The candles had been put out, and a slim, white-clad Japanese slipped like a ghost through the silvery moonlight, presented us with cigars, and faded away into the darkness of the bungalow. I looked through a screen of banana and lehua trees, and down across the guava scrub to the quiet sea a thousand feet beneath. For a week, ever since I had landed from the tiny coasting-steamer . . . no wind had ruffled that unvexed sea. True, there had been breezes, but they were the gentlest zephyrs that ever blew through summer isles. They were not winds; they were sighs—long, balmy sighs of a world at rest.

“A lotus land,” I said. (121)

What is striking, here as elsewhere in the story, is how much space London devotes to nearly cliché descriptions of the paradisiacal side of Hawai’i. One can read these glimpses of pre-lapsarian bliss as meant to offer a stark contrast to the fall of a white male hero. My own reading is slightly different. I want to suggest that these descriptions are there to point to an “emergent environmentality,” taking here the form of an essential duplicitousness attributed to America’s newly acquired tropical paradise. The difference from the “Koolau” tale is obvious. When white males are involved, Hawai’i is represented as beautiful but dangerous, Edenic but treacherous. It reaches out to Caucasians, lures them in, so that like Cudworth, they are unable to leave. And then they die, when leprosy hits them through conduits the narrative does not bother to detail.

Balmy breezes and a distinctive disease ecology are as dangerous to the white colonizer’s mental and physical health as are the temptations of Joseph Conrad’s Africa. I am not saying this was London’s primary concern—Lyte Gregory was probably just another example for him of male heroism in adversity. Nor do I claim that London was consciously willing it to be so.

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However, London tells this story in such a way that environmentality moves to the forefront. He even attributes to the island what Lauren Berlant in a different context has called “lateral agency” (18, 95). It is almost as if London were here taking up Mouritz’s idea, quoted earlier, of an “atmosphere of leprosy” enveloping the Hawai’ian islands. Coming literally out of nowhere, not gone but rather “come with the wind,” even the strongest, most virile American, like the unwitting sheriff, can get “it”—leprosy. One might well argue that the disease organizes a narrative of strength and depletion, of “purity and danger,” to use Mary Douglas’s words. In this way, “The Sheriff of Kona,” while ostensibly celebrating American virility, simultaneously conveys the American colonizers’ somatic anxieties.

ColonialiSm, diSeaSe eCologieS, and liteRaRy RegionaliSm

Many readers have described London’s Hawai’ian stories as giving once again a voice to the marginalized and disenfranchised—this time an indigenous population (Hornung 269). The reading attempted in this paper goes in a different direction, emphasizing instead how in these stories Hawai’i and its people figure as a living reservoir of a deadly disease posing serious risks to U.S.-American colonizers and empire builders, while casting them in the role of “sentimental and biologically vulnerable victim[s] of a disease brought by other racialized groups” (Ahuja 35). In the fictional world of London’s tales, as in the historical context in which they are set, leprosy functions as a script for regional otherness—an otherness that refused to stay in place. It is perhaps no accident that London thus invests this environment with an added, portentous urgency, perhaps even agency. And while in the “Koolau” story the presence of leprosy is neatly distributed along the colonial divide, separating the colonizing Caucasian sheep from the native Hawai’ian goats, the local disease ecology in “The Sheriff of Kona” is shown to be interfering with the forming of American masculinity in inscrutable ways. It is what I have elsewhere called a “figure of intervention” (Kunow xviii), one where the proximate and the distant, the local and the global, the private and the public, intersect and interact to interfere with individual and collective dreams and designs.

And this brings me to the conceptual frame and topic of this special section, namely regionalism. In these brief concluding remarks, I will attempt to situate London’s stories and my reading of them inside the ongoing debate about literary regionalism. Most often, literary regionalism is assumed to be about sectional differences—locations that are somehow out of sync with the larger social and cultural manifold. Such a positionality is then associated with the quaint and the picturesque, the desire for retreat from the dreary life of industrial capitalism, “look[ing] away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes,” as the Oxford Companion to American

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Literature puts it in its entry on regionalism. There is much of that in London’s Hawai’ian stories, and they are regionalist in that sense. However that is not the whole story.

Diseases, like leprosy, mark a form of emphatic regionalism, one that simultaneously insists on local specificity and at the same time produces connectivities with larger contexts. What, for lack of a better term, might be called biomedical regionalism is essentially “about” such connectivities, about a remote location at once fraught with “difference” and included in larger structures. Recent revisions of this concept of regionalism, 7 among them Amy Kaplan’s, offer ways of understanding this curious interplay of situatedness and outreach. They do so by insisting on the inescapable ties—I would call them the dialectics—interlinking region and center and emphasizing “how regions painted with ‘local color’ are traversed by the forgotten history of racial conflict with prior regional inhabitants, and are ultimately produced and engulfed by the centralized capitalist economy” (Kaplan 256). London’s Hawai’ian stories gesture at such an expanded, dialectical understanding of region and regionalism. They depict a location in which a distinctive disease ecology triangulates relations between indigenous people and settler colonists, and they also betray some of the representational quandaries involved in any attempt to come to terms with these dialectics. Filled with monsters, fallen heroes and an ominous ecology, they produce the drama, but not the ambiguities, of a constellation of “intimate distances” (Dillon 15): distances that evolve when people are sharing the same terrible fate and yet, in spite of this intimate connection, face a seemingly unbridgeable experiential and sociocultural difference, that of colonialism.

Rüdiger Kunow Potsdam University, Germany

7. Much current criticism now reads nineteenth- and twentieth-century regionalism as always global and cosmopolitan, intricately enmeshed in circuits of trade and diverse cultures in ways that belie its pretense at being “merely” local in conception and subject matter. In addi-tion, many critics now focus on “critical regionalism,” a term derived from architecture and associated with Neil Campbell’s book The Rhizomatic West (2008). In “Place & Worlding” (2015), Krista Comer defines critical regionalism as “a way of diagnosing the new configura-tions of meaning, time and space occasioned by global restructuring and new technologies—it is a political/cultural imagination and a mode of embodiment . . .” (156).

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WORKS CITED

Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Print.

Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.

Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2009. Print.

Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Print.

Comer, Krista. “Place & Worlding: Feminist States of Critical Regionalism.” Transcontinental Reflections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds Beyond Borders. Eds. Ángel Chaparro Sainz and Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo. Valencia: Portal Editions SL, 2015. 153-71. Print.

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddox. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. New York: The Free Press, 1966. Print.

Engels, Frederick. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. 1878. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1947. Web. 27 July 2019.

Erkkilä, Betsy. Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Print.

Fluck, Winfried. “Realismus, Naturalismus, Vormoderne.” Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Ed. Hubert Zapf. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996. 154-217. Print.

Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and other Inmates. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Print.

Haraway, Donna Jane. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-82. Print.

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Hart, James D., and Phillip W. Leininger. “Regionalism.” The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 6th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Web. 27. July 2019.

Herman, R. D. K. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Out of Power. Leprosy, Race, and Colonization in Hawai’i.” Hulili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being 6 (2010): 265-96. Print.

Hornung, Alfred. Jack London: Abenteuer des Lebens. Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 2016. Print.

Kaplan, Amy. “Nation, Region, and Empire.” The Columbia History of the American Novel. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 240-66. Print.

Kunow, Rüdiger. Material Bodies: Biology and Culture in the United States. Heidelberg: Winter, 2018. Print.

Lincoln, Roger J., Geoff A. Boxshall, and Paul F. Clark. A Dictionary of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Print.

London, Charmian K. Our Hawaii [sic]. Norwood: Norwood Press, 1917. Print.

London, Jack. “Koolau the Leper.” 1909. Tales of the Pacific. Ed. and introd. Andrew Sinclair. London: Penguin, 1989. 135-50. Print.

---. “The Sheriff of Kona.” 1908. Tales of the Pacific. Ed. and introd. Andrew Sinclair. London: Penguin, 1989. 121-34. Print.

National Research Council. Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences. Washington: National Academy Press, 2001. Print.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Shaw, Albert. “Leading articles of the month.” The American Monthly Review of Reviews 17.96 (1898): 75-78. Internet Archive, 2014. Web. 19 Aug. 2019.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. “The Bottle Imp.” 1892. Internet Archive, 2014. Web. 27 July 2019.

---. Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu. 1889-1890. 1899. Boston: Alfred Bartlett, 1900. Print.

Stoddard, Charles Warren. The Lepers of Molokai. 1885. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1908. Print.

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Tayman, John. The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. Print.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt & Co., 1953. Print.

Cet article se propose d’examiner une forme de régionalisme littéraire qui trouva à se développer à un moment charnière de l’histoire des États-Unis. L’expansion américaine de la fin du xixe siècle reconfigura en effet la relation entre humains et environnement. Une nouvelle biopolitique du “lieu” émergea alors, suscitée par l’exposition des colons américains à des milieux morbides qui leur étaient jusque-là inconnus et qui menaçaient leur vision exceptionnaliste d’une masculinité et d’une blancheur triomphantes. Cette contribution s’appuie sur des passages tirés des nouvelles hawaïennes de Jack London afin d’y déceler les contours de la dialectique coloniale qui articule expansion et exposition.

THE MAKING OF LISTS: ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S LITERARY EXPERIMENTS WITH GLOSSARIES OF

SOUTHERN RURAL AND NORTHERN URBAN AFRICAN AMERICAN TERMS AND EXPRESSIONS

FRom oRality to liteRaCy: huRSton’S uSe oF liteRatuRe to inveStigate the PoSSibilitieS oF WRiting

Zora Neale Hurston’s work is generally celebrated for its uses of regionalism, dialect, and folklore which have been widely discussed over the past decades. Surprisingly, however, relatively little, if any, critical attention has been paid to the manifold lists that are spread across her work and letters and especially to the “glossaries” that accompany three of her prose texts: Hurston’s first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), her anthropological study Mules and Men (1935), and her short story “Story in Harlem Slang” (1942). Typically, critics regard Hurston’s glossaries as more or less insignificant textual add-ons or “paratexts,” a term coined by Gérard Genette (1-3), and consequently refer to them only briefly, if they mention them at all, in their discussions of Hurston’s œuvre. A case in point is the biographer and literary critic Robert Hemenway who, in his well-known and often-cited study Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977), neglects to mention that Mules and Men and Jonah’s Gourd Vine also have a glossary appended. He notes only that Hurston’s “‘Story in Harlem Slang’ was less fiction than a linguistic study; a glossary of Harlem expressions was attached” (291), before he sums up the plot of the short story. 1

1. Likewise Henry Louis Gates, Jr. focuses on Hurston’s “speakerly text” in his seminal work The Signifying Monkey (1989) and merely mentions Hurston’s glossary at the end of “Story in Harlem Slang” (251).

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Other critics argue that Hurston’s glossaries point to her role as a mediator or translator between cultures. In the introduction of Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (1994), John Lowe, for instance, likens Hurston to Dante’s Virgil, because like him she “take[s] her readers on a tour of what they think are the ‘lower depths’ and scramble[s] their notions of what Heaven and Hell, God and Devil are” (33). In line with the simile, he claims that “she often casts herself as explicator of the places she shows” (33), which

becomes obvious . . . in her repeated appendage of ‘glossaries’ to various texts, a natural outgrowth of adding brief translations of idiomatic terms discovered in her folklore-gathering trips in her letters to Godmother. The roles of guide and translator always imply her equality with the reader, and frequently . . . superiority. (33)

Without examining the glossaries in detail, Lowe contends on the one hand that they represent “a natural outgrowth” of Hurston’s role as a cultural translator of black idiomatic expressions with which she made black language and culture accessible to her white patron and benefactress Charlotte Osgood Mason (“Godmother”). On the other hand, Lowe suggests that her performance as a translator leveled, if not overturned, the hierarchical relationship between the white patron and her African American protégée.

This essay will focus on Hurston’s glossaries, which, I claim, are the outcome of her deep interest in the topic of orality and literacy. 2 She experienced herself the transition from being a member of a predominantly oral community to being a member of a literate one when she learned to read and write in school. Yet, it was the practice of translating black vernacular speech into writing which made her notice that the act of reading also involves a translation process: dialect writing asks readers to (re)translate the literary dialect in their minds. It also made her aware of the visual domain of writing (and print) which stimulated her to explore the nexus between typography (visual aspects of writing that have no aural equivalent, for example), meaning, textual context, and the audience. Hurston’s exploration of the visual dimension of writing enabled her in turn to engage in what Jack Goody calls “the process of decontextualisation” (78), that is, the process of separating individual units (such as words) from their immediate context (sentences) in order to better scrutinize and possibly rearrange them in lists (78). Hurston began her investigation of the decontextualization process with “playful exercises” in the visual domain of writing (see especially her “play” with parentheses, italics, upper and lower case, abbreviations, and acronyms in the unpublished short story “The Bone of Contention”). Subsequently, she started to establish her own modern “Listenwissenschaft” (see Goody’s reference to ancient “Listenwissenschaften” [94]), by exploring all kinds of ways of making lists

2. See Ong for a classic introduction to this topic.

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and larger bodies of text that are short forms and per se separate (and thus “decontextualized”) from the actual text: glossaries.

After briefly outlining Goody’s main ideas on “the process of decontextualization” as found in Chapter 5, “What’s in a list?,” of his study The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), it will be suggested that Hurston encountered the idea of making glossaries during her anthropological studies at Barnard College. She possibly recognized that the practice of creating a glossary—which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as a “collection of glosses; a list with explanations of abstruse, antiquated, dialectal, or technical terms; a partial dictionary” (“Glossary, n1”)—decontextualizes words and phrases from the main text and enables the practitioner to reflect on how to arrange the isolated words and phrases—for instance in an alphabetical or numbered order. She also probably recognized that the making of lists and glossaries could be useful for her endeavor of writing literary texts about her all-black community: she knew a “language” (black vernacular speech) that was unfamiliar to most readers, she could “record” the “language” in her literary works and, like an anthropologist and translator, she could attach a glossary explaining words or phrases used in the text in order to ensure a successful translation and communication process between text and reader. Additionally, however, the practice of making a glossary led her to the question of how to “recontextualize” the glossary to the literary text, that is, it made her reflect on the ways in which readers can use the glossary during their translation process. Some of her questions were: How does a glossary work? Which words and expressions are included in a glossary and which ones are excluded? How does a reader know when to look for a term in the glossary? The second part of this essay will closely examine two pairs of glossaries: first, through a comparison of the glossary at the end of Jonah’s Gourd Vine with the glossary at the end of Mules and Men, as both glossaries share a common source or “‘semantic field’” (Goody 103): the language and folklore of a Southern rural region which Hurston knew very well, her hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Then, it will look at the “Glossary of Harlem Slang” attached to the short story “Story in Harlem Slang” and its manuscript version. Having lived, studied, and worked in Harlem/New York on and off for more than fifteen years, Hurston was quite familiar with the semantic field of “Harlem Slang” as well.

Overall this contribution intends to demonstrate that Hurston—after having studied anthropology at Barnard College—used literary texts to study and experiment with both processes—the decontextualization process and the recontextualization process—when she created different glossaries of terms and idiomatic expressions used in a Southern rural region (Eatonville, Florida) as well as in a Northern urban setting (Harlem, New York). 3 She understood herself to be a literary scientist and, as Charles King points out in his book The Reinvention of Humanity (2019), referred to her research area on her

3. This essay is part of a larger project on Zora Neale Hurston, dialect writing, and translation.

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application form for a Guggenheim Fellowship as “‘literary science’” (qtd. in King 275). Proceeding from simple lists, she moved on to create increasingly complex lists by adding further ordering patterns to the initial entries and, finally, created a complicated, ambivalent scenario in which it remains unclear whether she compiled an extensive dictionary of urban “Harlemese” (Hurston, “Story of Harlem Slang” 1001), which was guided by a rough idea of a linguistic-driven short story, before or after (or during) the act of writing the short story “Story in Harlem Slang.” Drawing on the terms collected in the unpublished glossary “Harlem Slanguage,” she seemingly tries to use as many words from the dictionary as possible in order to establish a very close connection between the short narrative and the glossary attached in the published version which displays an alphabetical arrangement of the entries.

the making oF liStS: JaCk goody’S “PRoCeSS oF deContextualization” and zoRa neale huRSton’S diSCoveRy oF the tRanSlation PRoCeSS and gloSSaRieS

Writing a black dialect, that is, the process of translating black vernacular speech into writing, made Hurston notice that the act of reading a black literary dialect also involves a translation process. A brief excerpt from Hurston’s second short story, “Drenched in Light” (1924), will illustrate the translation activity:

“Isie, you set ’own on dat porch! Uh great big ’leben yeah ole gal racin’ an’ rompin’ lak dat—set ’own!” (Hurston, “Drenched in Light” 941)

Standard English (my translation):

“Isie, you sit down on that porch! A great big eleven year-old girl racing and romping like that—sit down!”

Perhaps Hurston’s use of the apostrophe shows best that she engaged in a translation process when she rendered black vernacular speech into a written form and that she, at the same time, had the reader in mind: for instance, the apostrophes in “’own” and “’leben” demonstrate that Hurston deliberately inserted the apostrophes into the Standard English words to indicate to the readers that the dialect speaker, Grandma Potts, does not pronounce the initial ‘d’ (“down”) and the initial ‘e’ (“eleven”) in both words, “’own” and “’leben.” Simultaneously the apostrophes not only document that Hurston translated her (imagined) black speech into a written form by omitting one or more letters from the normative spelling of Standard English words, but they also permit readers to (re)translate the dialect words into black vernacular speech

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and, easing the access to the normative spelling of the words, identify their denotative meaning. As the example “(loins)” below shows, Hurston is aware of the fact that readers may not be able to ascertain the intended literal meaning of a dialect expression (“lines”) and therefore provides dictionary-like entries for selected dialect words (“(loins)”), which she deems need additional information, in order to warrant a successful communication between text and reader.

The translation process involved in dialect writing also made Hurston detect the visual dimension of writing and what Goody has described as “the process of decontextualization” (78). He argues that writing has two central functions: first, it serves as a “storage function, that permits communication over time and space, and provides man with a marking, mnemonic and recording device” (78); second, it

shifts language from the aural to the visual domain, and makes possible a different kind of inspection, the re-ordering and refining not only of sentences, but of individual words. Morphemes can be removed from the body of the sentence, the flow of oral discourse, and set aside as isolated units capable not simply of being ordered within a sentence, but of being ordered outside this frame, where they appear in a very different and highly ‘abstract’ context. (78)

Goody calls this additional function of writing “the process of decontextualization” (78), which enables practitioners to make lists, among which he distinguishes between three different types: the king-list, the shopping list, and the lexical list (80). The emergence of written lists in hitherto oral cultures, he claims, changed the “‘modes of thought’ that accompanied them, at least if we interpret ‘modes of thought’ in terms of the formal, cognitive and linguistic operations which this new technology of the intellect opened up” (81). He points out that such lists have to be “processed in a different way not only from normal speech but from other ways of writing, ways that we may consider at once more typical and closer to speech” (81), and provides a set of “positive features of the written list” (81), which he explains in the following paragraph:

The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity; it depends on physical placement, on location; it can be read in different directions, both sideways and downwards, up and down, as well as left and right; it has a clear-cut beginning and a precise end, that is, a boundary, an edge, like a piece of cloth. Most importantly it encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract. (81)

For him the very practice of making a list involves a classification procedure and establishes a hierarchical order:

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The arrangement of words (or “things”) in a list is itself a mode of classifying, of defining a “semantic field,” since it includes some items and excludes others. Moreover it places those items in a hierarchy with the “highest” items at the top of the column and the “lowest” at the bottom. Logograms for numbers may then get attached to the ordered list, so that the items are numbered 1 to n, beginning at the head, ending at the tail. (103)

From the very beginning of her literary career, Hurston demonstrated her awareness of the visual domain of writing and her interest in explaining unfamiliar words to a literate, Standard English speaking audience, both of which were a prerequisite for her subsequent list-making endeavor: for instance, she deliberately alternates between longer and shorter sections written in Standard English and black dialect in her first short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” to emphasize the visual contrast between standard and dialect passages and, in her second short narrative, “Drenched in Light,” she inserts a translation of the dialect word “lines” at the end of the sentence in order to clarify the meaning of the dialect expression: “‘If she ain’t down by de time Ah gets dere, Ah’ll break huh down in de lines’ (loins)” (Hurston, “Drenched” 940).

After her enrollment at Barnard College, Hurston soon embarked on a serious study of lists. In a letter to Barnard trustee Annie Nathan Meyer, which is dated June 23, 1923, but, as Amy Kaplan persuasively argues, was most likely written in 1925, she presents Ms. Meyer with a spontaneously developed outline of a plot for a novel (based on the then well-publicized “Stillman case,” [see Kaplan 58]) in the shape of a list:

1. The Emperor complexa. can do no wrongb. high disdain of women when all pleasure is squeezed out ofthem—cast them aside.

2 The Saul parallel(in his the dream or vision of David’s mailed fist hurling himdown from his throne.)b. His highly paid lawyers are the witch of End-Or.c. The conventions finally get him

3 By threats to ruin her in the eyes of her children he obtains her consent ot [sic] divorce. . . .

a. divorces wife.B. marries chorus girlc deserted by society . . . d Takes her abroad for that society . . . (Kaplan 58)

The missing periods after sections “2” and “3,” the omission of an entry that begins with the letter “a” in the second section (“2 The Saul parallel”),

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the capitalized “B.” in “3 By threats to ruin her …” (which deviates from the pattern established in the previous two headings: “1. The Emperor complex” and “2 The Saul parallel”), and the omission of periods after “c” and “d” in the alphabetically ordered “subplot”-list display Hurston’s deliberate (and playful) interest in ordering techniques and hierarchies. She probably wanted to impress her benefactress, who offered her a scholarship to attend Barnard in 1925, with what appears to be the “translation” of a plot outline into a table of contents-like list. Whatever the reason behind her writing it, this list, her first one, marks the beginning of her “Listenwissenschaft,” which reaches peaks in 1927 and 1932-35 and then again in 1942 (with the publication of “Story in Harlem Slang”).

Since 1925 was also the year of Hurston’s enrollment at Barnard, it is very likely that she encountered lexical lists in her courses in anthropology and linguistics, which triggered her interest in lists. Like many other students of anthropology at Barnard, she had Gladys Reichard and Ruth Benedict as her teachers, who certainly must have exposed her to relevant methods and topics as well as to their work in the field of anthropology. 4 While Benedict’s early treatise on The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America (1923) evinces only a brief table of contents and short lists of numbered footnotes at the bottom of many pages, Reichard’s linguistic work on Wiyot Grammar and Texts (1925) abounds with lists, such as the table of contents (1-3), vertical lists of verb stems and their conjugations, the list of “Colloquial Expressions and Exclamations” in partial alphabetical order (140), and horizontal lists of numbered sentences in her collection of Wiyot tales. She presents each tale first in its original language and then in translation whereby each sentence in both texts is numbered so that a reader can easily compare a sentence in Wiyot with its equivalent in English. Reichard’s study also offers several different ways of ordering lists. The first part of her table of contents, for instance, exhibits her use of the section sign (§) and a numeral to generate a hierarchical list of sections devoted solely to Wiyot grammar and pronunciation (e.g., “§1. Introduction” and “§§ 2-6. Phonetics” and so on). The second part, which is devoted to the Wiyot tales, uses only numerals to catalogue the stories told by different native informants (e.g., the section entitled “Wiyot Tales Told by Jerry” begins with “1. Nettle medicine” and “2. Wolf’s home” and so on). In section “§37. Verb Stems,” Reichard employs an entirely different system of ordering as well:

The words in the following vocabulary have been arranged in the order given here, the scheme of arrangement being determined by the position of the mouth in forming the sounds; namely vowels, semi-vowels, labials, dentals, palatals, laterals, trills; corresponding sonant being listed before surds and stops before continuants. (106-07)

4. On Hurston’s time at Barnard and her teachers (Gladys Reichard, Ruth Benedict, Melville J. Herskovits, and Franz Boas, see King, esp. 188-89, 192-93, 195-96, 200-204, 209, 211, 293-94.

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Rather than arranging the verb stems alphabetically, Reichard chose to list them according to their place of articulation in the mouth.

Subsequent publications by Hurston’s teachers and fellow anthropology students at Barnard also introduced her to the use of glossaries. One of the earliest anthropological study with a glossary appended to the main text was Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (1928), which contains a two-and-a-half page long “Glossary of Native Terms Used in the Text” (295-97). Later publications by Melville J. Herskovits, his wife, and Franz Boas show that glossaries of terms taken from foreign languages had become common in anthropological studies: for example, Melville J. and Frances S. Herskovits’ book Suriname Folk-Lore (published in 1936; the “Preface” was written in 1932; the collecting of material happened in 1928-29) comes with an “Appendix I: ‘Glossary of Taki-Taki Words Appearing in the Introductory Notes’” (743-50); Melville J. Herskovits’s Life in a Haitian Valley (1937) includes as “Appendix IV” the “Glossary of Créole Terms Used in the Text” (343-50); and Franz Boas’ posthumous publication of Kwakiutl Grammar with a Glossary of the Suffixes (1947) comprises a glossary as well (in 1892, Boas still used the term “Vocabulary” as a title for the alphabetically ordered list of Kwakiutl words, see Vocabulary of the Kwakiutl Language 39). Since Hurston’s letters to Charlotte Osgood Mason (May 26 and July 6, 1932; Kaplan 257, 263-64), for instance, display her use of the non-oral, mathematical equals sign (“=”)—often used in anthropology to represent a marriage—to indicate an equality of a saying and its translation (for example: “1. ‘Bucks above suspicion’ = a lot of money” [Kaplan 257]), she most likely adopted the term “glossary” and the practice of making glossaries from anthropology and experimented with glossaries in the two letters mentioned above and later on in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and her literary-anthropological study Mules and Men.

zoRa neale huRSton’S liteRaRy inveStigationS oF gloSSaRieS

Two Glossaries of Terms Used in a Rural Southern Region and Hurston’s Decontextualization and Recontextualization Processes

By the time Hurston moved on to explore the making of glossaries and figure out how they worked, she had gathered much experience with numbered lists. In 1927, she had “translated” “The Book of Harlem,” the unpublished “Book of Harlem,” and “Monkey Junk,” stories about African Americans migrating from the rural South to Harlem, by translating their black vernacular speech into near-biblical language and by structuring her stories in a manner also reminiscent of the bible (book and verses). These literary exercises involved an extensive “play” with typography (italics, symbols like the asterisk “*”, missing letters, gaps, etc.), the differences between a book of the Bible and a “regular” book, and especially

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with the expectations raised by a numerical series of sentences, as the initial plot summary that follows right after the title of the short story “The Book of Harlem” illustrates: “1. Jazzbo counteth the shekels of his father and resolveth to depart for Harlem. 10. Whamm blesseth him. 14. He cometh to Harlem. 18. He learneth modern ways and disporteth himself” (Hurston, “The Book of Harlem” 566). These exercises demonstrate that Hurston was highly aware of the translation process and the notion that reading is a complicated process which relies on the interplay between visual (non-oral) and aural information. She had also started to create numbered lists of her linguistic material, which she gathered during her field trips to Florida (see the numbered list of expressions in her letter to Lawrence Jordan on May 3, 1927; Kaplan 98-99), and had made two proto-glossaries (playing, for instance, with the mark that follows after a number of the numerical list: period, dash or the omission of the respective mark), which she added, like a postscript, immediately below her signature in the two above-mentioned letters to her patron she usually referred to as “Godmother” (May 26 and July 6, 1932; Kaplan 257, 263-64).

Hurston’s process of decontextualization gains in complexity when she supplements her debut novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, an autobiographical work of fiction that is based on the lives of her parents, with a glossary of dialect expressions used in the narrative. Moving beyond her earlier experiments with providing, for instance, dictionary-like entries for individual dialect expressions (see the example “lines” / “(loins)” mentioned above), she realizes that a dialect novel involves an extended translation process on the part of the reader and thus requires multiple dictionary entries. Instead of giving them numbers as she did in her previous lists, she catalogues them in the order of their appearance in the novel and provides the page number at the end of the entry. If two or more words or phrases are on the same page (see, for instance, “Buckra” and “Patter roller” in the excerpt below), she orders them according to their location on the page (that is, “Buckra” appears before “Patter roller” on page 9; the same principle applies to the subsequent glossary entries, “An’ hagar’s chillun” and “Apin’ down de road,” which, in addition, follow an alphabetical order):

Glossary

lidaRd knot, fat pine wood, generally used for kindling. 4

buCkRa, white people. 9

PatteR RolleR, “Patrollers,” an organization of the late slavery days that continued through the Reconstruction period. Its main objective was the intimidation of Negroes. Similar to the K. K. K.

9

an’ hagaR’S Chillun, Negroes, as against Sarah’s children, the whites 11

aPin’ down de road, running away 11

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ChaPS, children. Old English use. 14

talkin’ at de big gate, boasting. Making pretence of bravery behind the back of a powerful person. The allusion comes from the old slavery-time story of the negro who boasted to another that he had given Ole Massa a good cussin’ out. The other believed him and actually cussed Ole Massa out the next time that he was provoked, and was consequently given a terrible beating. When he was able to be at work again he asked the first negro how it was that he was not whipped for cussing Ole Massa. The first negro asked the other if he had cussed Ole Massa to his face. “Sho a h did. Ain’t dat whut you tole me done?” “Aw naw, fool. Ah ain’t tole yuh nothin uh de kind. As said Ah give Ole Massa uh good cussin’ out and Ah did. But when Ah did dat, he wuz settin up on de verandah and Ah wuz down at de big gate. You sho is uh big fool. It’s uh wonder Ole Massa didn’t kill you dead.”

15

ShiCkalaCked, a sound-word to express noise of a locomotive 16

(Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine 169)

Hurston, however, noticed that the process of isolating individual words and phrases from the main text and generating a separate glossary at the end of the novel runs into one major difficulty: how does the reader know which word to look up? Readers may stumble across an unfamiliar word and, if lucky, find the equivalent translation or explanation in the glossary, but for the most part they would not know which expression they could search for in the glossary. It would be a mere guessing game and the glossary would be an ineffectual addendum to the text. In fact, she realized that her glossary worked backwards: readers would have to consult the glossary entries first, make a mental note of the page number, go to the desired page, and then hunt for the exact location of the word or expression on the page. Hence, she experimented with ways of re-connecting or re-contextualizing the glossary entries to the text. In one instance she utilizes quotation marks to make the word “’miration” stand out from its surrounding context and thus invite the reader to look it up in the glossary (27) and, in another one, she uses capitals for the word “Lay-Over” (“’Cause dem is some uh Lay-Over’s biddies,” 66; emphasis mine) in order to draw the readers’ attention to the typographically altered expression so that they may check its precise meaning in the glossary. She also employed quotation marks in her glossary entry of the word “cold” to signal to the readers that the subsequent explanation referred to the word “cold” and not to any other word, but this use of quotation marks does not lead to a re-contextualization of the glossary entry. Rather, the readers still would have to go to page 129 and search for the word “cold,” which has no quotation marks in the text (“Man he kin cold preach.”), on that page. For the main part, however, the glossary remains decontextualized and, as such, impractical to use.

As a consequence, Hurston changes her approach to re-connect the glossary to the main text in her next work Mules and Men. This time she uses

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numbered footnotes for words and phrases she wishes to explain in the text and always begins with the number “1” in each chapter. Whenever she wants to refer to an entry in the glossary, she adds a footnote number to the respective word, provides a brief explanation of the term at the bottom of the page, and then states “See glossary.” In the following example, she places consecutive footnote numbers immediately after the words “John” and “booger” (“John1” and “booger2”) and gives a brief explanation at the end of the page:

1Negro story-hero name. See glossary.2A bogey man.

(Hurston, Mules and Men 15)

Hurston also varies her use of footnotes: sometimes she places a footnote number after a word and simply writes “See glossary.” at the bottom of the page without providing a short explanation (for example: “… testimony and songs.3” / “3See glossary.”, 24), and once she capitalizes an expression and places the footnote number at the end of the sentence: “Among others, he taught me verses of JOHN HENRY, the king of railroad track-laying songs which runs as follows:11” and writes “11See glossary.” in the respective footnote. What all of the footnotes have in common, though, is that they are short and do not exceed the length of a line.

The glossary, by contrast, contains 11 longer entries which, like the ones in the previous glossary, are not in alphabetical order but follow the order of appearance in the text and, in addition, exhibit a combination of two kinds of ordering principles: the length of an entry (the alternation between shorter and longer entries) and the type of an entry (names and practices). A closer look at the alternation of the shorter and longer entries as well as the names and practices denoted by the individual entries shows that Hurston carefully constructs increasingly complex patterns from which she deviates in a subsequent step. In other words, she moves from a simple ordering system to a more complex one by adding further ordering principles to the first one. For a better understanding of her exploration of generating progressively complex ordering systems, the complete glossary has to be reproduced:

GLOSSARY

JaCk oR John (not John Henry) is the great human culture hero in Negro folk-lore. He is like Daniel in Jewish folk-lore, the wish-fulfillment hero of the race. The one who, nevertheless, or in spite of laughter, usually defeats Ole Massa, God and the Devil. Even when Massa seems to have him in a hopeless dilemma he wins out by a trick. Brer Rabbit, Jack (or John) and the Devil are continuations of the same thing.

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WooFing is a sort of aimless talking. A man half seriously flirts with a girl, half seriously threatens to fight or brags of his prowess in love, battle or in financial matters. The term comes from the purposeless barking of dogs at night.

teStimony. There is a meeting called a “love-feast” in the Methodist Church and an “experience meeting” with the Baptists. It is held once a month, either on a week-night or a Sunday morning preceding the Communion service. It is a Protestant confessional. No one is supposed to take communion unless he is on good terms with all of the other church members and is free from sin otherwise. The love-feast gives opportunity for public expression of good-will to the world. There are three set forms with variations. (1) The person who expects to testify raises a hymn. After a verse or two he or she speaks expressing (a) love for everybody, (b) joy at being present, (c) tells of the determination to stay in the field to the end. (2) Singing of a “hot” spiritual, giving the right hand of fellowship to the entire church, a shouting, tearful finish. (3) (a) Expresses joy at being present, (b) recites incident of conversion, telling in detail the visions seen and voices heard, (c) expresses determination to hold out to the end.

It is singular that God never finds fault, never censures the Negro. He sees faults but expects nothing different. He is lacking in bitterness as is the Negro story-teller himself in circumstances that ordinarily would call for pity.

The devil is not the terror that he is in European folk-lore. He is a powerful trickster who often competes successfully with God. There is a strong suspicion that the devil is an extension of the story-makers while God is the supposedly impregnable white masters, who are nevertheless defeated by the Negroes.

John henRy. This is a song of the railroad camps and is suited to the spiking rhythm, though it is, like all the other work songs, sung in the jooks and other social places. It is not a very old song, being younger by far than Casey Jones and like that song being the celebration of an incidence of bravery. John Henry is not as widely distributed as “Mule on de Mount,” “Uncle Bud” or several of the older songs, though it has a better air than most of the work songs. John Henry has no place in Negro folklore except in this one circumstance. The story told in the ballad is of John Henry, who is a great steeldriver, growing jealous when the company installs a steam drill. He boasts that he can beat the steam drill hammering home spikes, and asks his boss for a 9-pound hammer saying that if he has a good hammer he can beat the steam drill driving. The hammer is provided and he attempts to beat the drill. He does so for nearly an hour, then his heart fails him and he drops dead from exhaustion. It is told in direct dialogue for the greater part. The last three verses show internal evidence of being interpolated from English ballads. Judge the comparative newness of the song by the fact that he is competing with something as recent as a steam drill. For music for “John Henry” see Appendix.

long houSe. Another name for jook. Sometimes means a mere bawdy house. A long low building cut into rooms that all open on a common porch. A woman lives in each of the rooms.

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blue baby. Nicknames such as this one given from appearances or acts, i.e. “Blue Baby” was so black he looked blue. “Tush Hawg,” a rough man; full of fight like a wild boar.

One notes that among the animals the rabbit is the trickster hero. Lacking in size, strength and natural weapons such as teeth and claws, he continues to overcome by cunning. There are other minor characters that are heroic, but Brer Rabbit is first. In Florida, Brer Gopher, the dry-land tortoise, is also a hero and perhaps nearly equal to the rabbit.

The colored preacher, in his cooler passages, strives for grammatical correctness, but goes natural when he warms up. The “ha” is a breathing device, done rhythmically to punctuate the lines. The congregation wants to hear the preacher breathing or “straining.”

geoRgia Skin game. Any number of “Pikers” can play at a time, but there are two “principals” who do the dealing. Both of them are not dealing at the same time, however. But when the first one who deals “falls” the other principal takes the deal. If he in turn falls it goes back to the first dealer. The principals draw the first two cards. The pikers draw from the third card on. Unless a player or players want to “scoop one in the rough,” he can choose his own card which can be any card in the deck except the card on top of the deck and that one goes to the dealer. The dealer charges anything he pleases for the privilege of “scooping,” the money being put in sight. It is the player’s bet. After the ones who wish to have scooped, then the dealer begins to “turn” the cards. That is, flipping them off the deck face upwards and the pikers choose a card each from among those turned off to bet on. Sometimes several pikers are on the same card. When all have selected their cards and have their bets down, they begin to chant “Turn ’em” to the dealer. He turns them until a player falls. That is, a card like the one he is holding falls. For instance one holds the 10 of hearts. When another 10 falls he loses. Then the players cry “hold ’em” until the player selects another clean card, one that has not fallen. The fresh side bets are down and the chant “turn ’em” and the singing “Let de deal go Down” until the deck is run out. (Hurston, Mules and Men 229-31)

After arranging the entries according to their sequential appearance in the text, Hurston establishes a general pattern which consists of two shorter entries and a longer one. However, she varies the pattern in several ways:

1. “JaCk oR John”: five sentences, 76 words.2. “WooFing”: three sentences, 43 words.3. “teStimony”: ten sentences, 179 words.

4. “It is singular that God […]”: three sentences, 38 words.5. “The devil is not the terror […]”: three sentences, 52 words.6. “John henRy”: 11 sentences (and a short phrase), 245 words.

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7. “long houSe”: four sentences, 34 words.8. “blue baby”: two sentences, 33 words.9. “One notes that among the animals the rabbit […]”: four sentences, 61 words.

10. “The colored preacher […]”: three sentences, 40 words.11. “geoRgia Skin game”: 19 sentences, 279 words.

While the first three “sections” follow the abovementioned pattern (1. short, 2. short, 3. long / 4. short, 5. short, 6. long / 7. short, 8. short, 9. long), the last section deviates from the previously established system, for it consists of only two entries, a short one and a long one (10. short, 11. long). A more intricate pattern emerges when we examine the number of sentences and the number of words of each entry: the first entry (1. “JaCk oR John”: five sentences, 76 words) is a bit longer than the second one (2. “WooFing”: three sentences, 43) whereas, in the second section, the second entry (5. “The devil is not the terror”: three sentences, 52 words) is a bit longer than the first one (4. “It is singular that God”: three sentences, 38 words). Both sections exhibit a large discrepancy between the number of sentences and words of the short entries and the number of sentences and words of the long one. A quick glance at the number of words in each entry suffices to demonstrate this gap: 76, 43 v. 179 / 38, 52 v. 245. In both sections, the long entries have nearly the same number of sentences and yet they differ significantly in length: ten sentences, 179 words (3. “teStimony”) v. eleven sentences (and a phrase), 245 words (6. “John henRy”). The third section still follows the general pattern (short, short, long), but the first two entries are noticeably shorter than the previous short entries and they have nearly the identical number of words: 34 words (7. “long houSe”) and 33 words (8. “blue baby”). Also, the large gap between the number of words of the short entries and the number of words of the long entry is much smaller (34, 33 v. 61) and ceases to exist on the sentence level: four sentences (7. “long houSe”), three sentences (8. “blue baby”) and four sentences (9. “One notes that among the animals the rabbit”). Hurston maximizes the difference between the number of sentences and words of the short entry and the number of sentences and words of the long entry in the final section of her glossary: three sentences, 40 words (10. “The colored preacher”) vs. 19 sentences, 279 words (11. “geoRgia Skin game”). Thus, the last entry carries an extra emphasis (end focus) and, like a full stop, concludes the glossary.

In addition to ordering the entries according to their length, Hurston also arranges them according to the type of entry. The first section displays three clearly identifiable entries (the editor of this edition uses small capitals for this purpose) of which the first one (1. “JaCk oR John”) refers to a “human culture hero” (Mules and Men 229) and the other two (2. “WooFing” and 3. “teStimony”) to cultural practices. The second section, however, begins with two observations about the role of God and the role of the devil in African

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American folklore, both of which are not perceptibly identified as entries in a glossary (with the exception of the space that separates one observation from the other). The third entry (6. “John henRy”), by contrast, is set in small capitals again and denotes a work song about another human culture hero: John Henry. Hurston reverses this way of ordering the entries in the third section, which starts out with two entries that are marked as entries (7. “long houSe” and 8. “blue baby”) and ends with an observation—unmarked as an entry—about two animal culture heroes: Brer Rabbit and Brer Gopher. The final section contrasts an observation about the ways in which “[t]he colored preacher” delivers a sermon with an easily detectable entry on “Georgia Skin Game” and omits any reference to a culture hero.

Having managed to reconnect or recontextualize the glossary with the help of footnotes in the main text (“See glossary.”), Hurston interlinks the entries of the glossary with each other and across the two glossaries. In order to interconnect the glossary of Jonah’s Gourd Vine with the glossary of Mules and Men, she duplicates the observation on “[t]he colored preacher” but changes the sentence structure and wording of the latter explanation slightly:

Jonah’s Gourd Vine:In his cooler passages the colored preacher attempts to achieve what to him is grammatical correctness, but as he warms up he goes natural. The “ha” in the sermon marks a breath. The congregation likes to hear the preacher breathing or “straining.” (171)

Mules and Men:The colored preacher, in his cooler passages, strives for grammatical correctness, but goes natural when he warms up. The “ha” is a breathing device, done rhythmically to punctuate the lines. The congregation wants to hear the preacher breathing or “straining.” (231)

Hurston also interrelates the entries of the second glossary with each other: for instance, the entry on “John henRy” refers back to the entry on “JaCk oR John” (see also her clarification “not John Henry” in parenthesis, which relates the two entries to each other) and the entries “John Henry,” “Jack or John,” and “One notes that among the animals the rabbit . . . ” have the theme of the “culture hero” in common. The two short entries of the second section—“It is singular that God . . . ” and “The devil is not the terror . . . ”—are bound to each other via their respective topics (“God” and “devil”) and, together with the entries on “teStimony” and “[t]he colored preacher,” form the small semantic field of “religion.” Last but not least, the two names of the animal trickster heroes, Brer Rabbit and Brer Gopher, which are mentioned in the ninth entry, point to the preceding entry on “blue baby,” in which Hurston explains the meaning of the two nicknames “Blue Baby” and “Tush Hawg.” By recontexutalizing the glossary with the main text and by interlinking the

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entries of the glossary with each other, Hurston seems to have exhausted her possibilities with this kind of glossary and develops a new approach to the literary text-glossary relationship in 1942.

ConStRuCting a Chain oF thought: huRSton’S neW aPPRoaCh to making a “gloSSaRy oF haRlem Slang”

The manuscript version of the glossary entitled “Harlem Slanguage” and the published “Glossary of Harlem Slang,” which is attached to the short narrative “Story in Harlem Slang” (1942), mark the final stage of Hurston’s long-term preoccupation with lists and glossaries. The editors of “Harlem Slanguage,” Lemke and Gates, argue in a footnote to the text that

“Harlem Slanguage” is Hurston’s unedited glossary as it appears in her original manuscript. In addition to the terms being alphabetized and condensed, many of the explicitly sexual definitions were eliminated before the list was published as the “Glossary of Harlem Slang” at the end of “Story in Harlem Slang.” (227)

To be sure, Hurston transforms the loose collection of terms that make up “Harlem Slanguage” into an alphabetically ordered list of terms and excluded several of the more overt sexual terms and explanations (for example, “Scooter-Pooker, a professional at sex,” 227, and “Knocking the pad, committing sex,” 232) from her “Glossary of Harlem Slang.” I want to emphasize, however, that Hurston develops a new approach to the process of making a glossary. Instead of beginning with a story and then creating a glossary of terms used in the text, she establishes an inconclusive scenario: the unpublished glossary “Harlem Slanguage,” which pretends to be the result of a continuous chain of thought, suggests to the readers that it was Hurston’s starting point, that is, she first collected the terms and then wrote the short narrative “Story in Harlem Slang.” Yet, she also could have written down the carefully constructed chain of thought after or even during the process of writing the short story. My focus will be on the difference between the imaginative rendering of the train of thought in “Harlem Slanguage” and the functional, alphabetically ordered “Glossary of Harlem Slang.” Apparently Hurston explored the change from the unpublished glossary (manuscript) that “documented” the workings of her mind, which she imagined as an associative chain of thought, to the published (printed) and alphabetically ordered glossary that enabled the general reader to look up and easily find the looked-for entry.

For the purpose of this experiment or investigation, Hurston developed a rough idea for a short story that would enable her to use as many dialect expressions as possible through a conversation between two hustlers in Harlem. Not only would the dialogue between the two hustlers enable her to

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indicate her familiarity with the slang used by pimps in Harlem, but it would also give her the opportunity to create a long list of dictionary entries because her audience would most likely be unfamiliar with the jargon. Whether or not Hurston actually wrote the story first and the glossary afterwards or vice versa, she certainly created a glossary that pretends to be the outcome of a long, associative chain of thought on the basic aspects of the short story (setting, topic of conversation, characters, etc.). A brief excerpt from the beginning of her “Harlem Slanguage”-list of terms and expressions will illustrate her procedure of carefully arranging a semantic field of Harlemese terms (“Harlem Slanguage”) and phrases that would be part of the vocabulary used by Harlem’s hustlers:

Harlem Slanguage

Sugar Hill, the northwest corner of Harlem near Washington Heights where most of the newest-occupied large apartment houses for Negroes are. Mostly occupied by professional Negroes. Walter White and others of his financial standing live at 409 Edgecombe. note: It is interesting to note that many expressions that come from the South, as this one does, have been distorted. In numerous southern towns, the Negro red-light district is cal-led “Sugar Hill.” The term was probably overheard without understanding its ori-ginal meaning.

Pilch, house or apartment, residenceScooter-pooker, a professional at sexScooter-pooking, practicing, or the act of sex

Jelly, sexJelly bean, a man who lives by sex, a pimpP.I., a pimpSweet-back, a pimpBull-diker, a flatter, a LesbianFlatter, LesbianScrap iron, cheap likkerConk buster, cheap likkerReefer, marijuana cigaretteDrag, a reeferMonkey chaser, a West IndianMiss Anne, a white womanMister Charlie, white manOfay, white personA Pan-cake, humble type of NegroHandkerchief-head, sycophant type of NegroUncle Tom, same as aboveJar Head, Negro manZigaboo, Negro

(Hurston, “Harlem Slanguage” 227)

The first two entries of the list (“Sugar Hill” and “Pilch”) display Hurston’s pretense of thinking first about the setting of the story before she searched her mind for slang expressions referring to the two main characters (hustlers) of her story, sex, lesbians, cheap liquor, cannabis joints, white men and women, and, finally, to different types of African American men. In fact, the entries enable the reader to follow Hurston’s imagined chain of thought: “Scooter-pooker” triggers a related expression for sex (“Scooter-pooking”) which in turn activates an alternative expression for sex (“Jelly”). “Jelly” then elicits

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the term “Jelly bean” for “pimp” (see explanation) which are subsequently followed by two other slang expressions for “pimp”: “P.I.” and “Sweet-back.” The two-part expression “Sweet-back”—together with the initial ‘“b”’ of “back”—evokes the two-part expression “Bull-diker” which, according to Hurston, denotes “a Flatter, a Lesbian.” Omitting the indefinite article “a” from “a Flatter” and “a Lesbian,” she utilizes the variation of the previous explanatory phrase as an individual entry for “Flatter” in the next line. Moving on to alcohol and cannabis cigarettes, she recalls two slang terms for cheap liquor or “likker” (“Scrap iron” and “Conk buster”) before she lists two entries for cannabis cigarettes: “Reefer, marijuana cigarette” and “Drag, a reefer” whereby the entry “Reefer” serves as an explanation of “Drag” in the following line. The next term “Monkey chaser” marks the beginning of a short list of slang expressions used for men and women with different ethnic backgrounds and represents an elegant transition from the rubric “alcohol and cigarettes” to “people,” for the noun “chaser,” which the OED defines as “5. A quantity of water or other mild beverage taken after spirituous liquor” (“Chaser n.1”), refers back to the two dialect expressions used for cheap liquor while the whole phrase “Monkey chaser” denotes “a West Indian” person. Hurston follows up the entry “Monkey chaser” with three terms for white people: “Miss Anne, a white woman,” “Mister Charlie, white man,” and “Ofay, white person.” The excerpt ends with three slang expressions for “obedient” African American men (the hyphenated two-part phrase “A Pan-cake” is linked to the subsequent hyphenated two-part expression “Handkerchief-head” while the explanation for “Uncle Tom” has the same explanation as the previous entry on “Handkerchief-head”) and two terms for “non-obedient” African American men (“Jar Head” and “Zigaboo”)—all of which are interconnected via the word “Negro.” The detailed description of Hurston’s supposed chain of thought suffices to demonstrate that the glossary of terms is carefully constructed. For example, the repetitive use of “pimp,” “likker,” “white,” and “Negro” interlinks the entries with each other and creates the impression of her associative and subjective chain of thought in which one term generates the next one and so forth.

Since the “Harlem Slanguage”-glossary consists of 153 entries and the published version, “Glossary of Harlem Slang,” only has 125 entries, Hurston certainly removed several entries from the final list. In the excerpt above, Hurston omitted the following entries from her “Glossary of Harlem Slang”: “Scooter-pooker,” “Scooter-pooking,” “Jelly bean,” “P.I.,” “Sweet-back,” “Bull-diker,” “Flatter,” “Drag,” and “Uncle Tom.” With the exception of “Drag” and “Uncle Tom,” all of the terms have a sexual meaning and, in fact, do not appear in the short story at all. “Sweet-back” is a significant exception: Hurston uses “Jelly” (see entry above) as a telling name for one pimp and “Sweet-back” for the other pimp. She also repeatedly employs the term “broad” (“Broad, girl or woman,” 231) in her short story (five times) and includes a saying together with

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its explanation in the story (“I’ll do like a farmer, plant you now and dig you later,” 227; see the slightly changed version in “Story of Harlem Slang”: “I’ll tell you like the farmer told the potato—plant you now and dig you later,” 1006) and yet she eliminates these entries from her “Glossary of Harlem Slang.” These practices suggest that Hurston drew on the glossary entitled “Harlem Slanguage,” which may seem “unedited” (“Harlem Slanguage” 227, footnote), but rather was a carefully arranged list of terms which pretended to be the result of an associative chain of thought.

Proceeding most likely from the rich source of terms collected in “Harlem Slanguage,” Hurston uses many words and phrases of her glossary in her short story about a conversation between two pimps in Harlem. Apparently, she attempts to cram as many slang expressions as possible into a short story so that the reader will be required to consult the glossary more often than not (and thus learn the jargon of Harlem’s hustlers), thereby strengthening the connection between the main text and the glossary. As a consequence, her undertaking leads to a short literary text which is overcrowded with terms explained in the glossary, as the initial paragraph of the short narrative illustrates:

Wait till I light up my coal-pot and I’ll tell you about this Zigaboo called Jelly. Well, all right now. He was a sealskin brown and papa-tree-top-tall. Skinny in the hips and solid built for speed. He was born with this rough-dried hair, but when he laid on the grease and pressed it down overnight with his stocking-cap, it looked just like that righteous moss, and had so many waves you got seasick from looking. Solid, man, solid! (Hurston, “Story of Harlem Slang” 1001; emphasis mine)

All of the italicized words and expressions appear in the glossary and show Hurston’s effort to pack as many entries from the collection of Harlemese terms as possible into her short story to “recontextualize” the main text with the glossary. Moving from the glossary to the text, Hurston does not need footnotes or typographically altered words to make readers aware of the possibility that they can look up the marked words in the glossary because her short text, overcrowded with “Slanguage,” invites readers to look up many words and learn more about further terms of the same semantic field in the glossary.

In a last step, Hurston transforms the list of terms collected in “Harlem Slanguage” into an alphabetically ordered “Glossary of Harlem Slang” by stripping the carefully constructed associative character of the supposedly spontaneous chain of thought from the earlier glossary. This process allows her to “condense” some of the entries (“Harlem Slanguage” 227, footnote), as the following excerpt from the “Glossary of Harlem Slang” exemplifies:

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Glossary Mentioned in the Short Story (page number)

Russian—a Southern Negro up north. “Rushed up here,” hence a Russian.

1005

Scrap iron—cheap liquor 1005

Sell out—run in fear

Sender—he or she who can get you to go, i.e., has what it takes. Used often as a compliment: “He’s a solid sender!”

Smoking, or smoking over—looking someone over

Solid—perfect 1001

Sooner—anything cheap and mongrel, now applied to cheap clothes, or a shabby person.

Stanch, or stanch out—to begin, commence, step out 1002

Stomp—low dance, but hot man!

Stormbuzzard—shiftless, homeless character

Stroll—doing something well

Sugar Hill—northwest corner of Harlem, near Washington Heights, site of newest apartment houses, mostly occupied by professional people. (The expression has been distorted in the South to mean a Negro red light district.)

1004

The bear—confession of poverty

The big apple, also the big red apple—New York City

(Hurston, “Story of Harlem Slang” 1010)

Indeed, the shortened entry on “Sugar Hill” in the excerpt corroborates Lemke and Gates’ observation referred to above. However, the omission of the entry on “Pilch” that follows the entry on “Sugar Hill” in the earlier glossary—“Harlem Slanguage”—and the alphabetical arrangement of terms such as “Monkey chaser,” which no longer refers associatively to the two slang terms for cheap liquor (“Scrap iron” and “Conk buster”), show that the creation of a systematic, densely packed glossary with relatively short dictionary entries goes hand in hand with a loss: it lacks the associative character of spontaneous thought which Hurston attentively created in “Harlem Slanguage.”

Hurston not only eliminated primarily terms with a sexual meaning from the published glossary and compressed a few entries, as Lemke and Gates have pointed out, but she also added a few terms to the glossary, such as “Astorperious—haughty, biggety” (1008) and “Pe-ola—a very white Negro

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girl” (1009), which are not collected in “Harlem Slanguage” but which she nevertheless uses in her short story. Made in the “Glossary of Harlem Slang,” such adjustments demonstrate once more her effort to enhance the already existing multiple connections between the text and the glossary in order to make sure that the readers would have no difficulty in looking up almost any unfamiliar word they encountered during their reading experience. And even though she crammed many words taken from the glossary into her narrative, she only managed to use a small fraction of the extensive glossary (see excerpt above).

liteRatuRe aS SCienCe: huRSton’S CReative aPPRoaCheS to the exPloRation oF the medium “WRiting”

Whereas Hurston is usually celebrated for her authentic portrayal of black vernacular speech and folklore in her works that draw on her experiences in the all-black community of Eatonville, I wanted to demonstrate that she employed literature not merely to “represent” or “capture” African American language and culture but rather as an important tool for conducting scientific research on the relationship between orality and literacy. She was a serious research scientist who combined anthropology with literature (as reflected in the dual structure of the texts) and continued anthropological research with the aid of literature. After the process of writing a literary dialect made her aware of the translation process involved in writing and reading dialect texts and the visual dimension of writing, she experimented with non-oral typographic features before she embarked on establishing a modern Listenwissenschaft. Adapting the glossaries she knew from her anthropological studies at Barnard to her literary-translatory needs, she recognized that the process of decontextualization required a process of recontextualization in order to make a glossary work. The readers (i.e., translators) needed some kind of hint in the text that would indicate them that they could look up the marked term in the glossary. Hurston then devised two different ways of connecting the main text with the glossary: first, she typographically altered words which were part of the glossary; second, she utilized footnotes (“See glossary.”) to invite readers to look up the word with the footnote number in the glossary. Finally, in a possible effort to demonstrate the difference between an associatively “structured” list and a systematically structured one, she created two different glossaries. Instead of isolating words or phrases from the text and arranging them in alphabetical order in an attached glossary, Hurston most likely devised a basic idea for a short story before she put together a collection of Harlemese terms, which, as I have shown above, pretended to be the result of an associative chain of thought. In the published short narrative “Story of Harlem Slang,” she changed her previous list into the alphabetically arranged “Glossary of Harlem Slang.” This experiment or exercise marked the apex of her

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Listenwissenschaft and probably had the purpose of highlighting the process of transforming an “associatively” arranged glossary into an alphabetically ordered one, which, on the one hand, eased the process of looking up words for the general reader, but, on the other hand, resulted in the loss of an individual series of intricately interlinked words that was the product of an associative—and highly subjective—chain of thought (or stream of consciousness). Put in the historical context of her times, Hurston’s foray into translation studies and Listenwissenschaft cannot be overstated. Unlike Alain Locke and many other members of the Harlem Renaissance who regarded themselves as thinkers and artists and who viewed literature as a mouthpiece for giving African Americans a voice, Hurston saw herself also as a research scientist and translator who used literature to explore decontextualization and recontextualization processes and discovered a way of creating complex ordering systems by adding two and more ordering principles to a simple list. In other words, her scientific approach to the making of lists and glossaries and, above all, her studies in translation enabled her to gain a better understanding of literacy and its practices as well as of the translation-communication process between author, text, and reader that set her apart from her contemporaries.

Erik Redling Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

WORKS CITED

Benedict, Ruth. The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America. Mena-sha, WI: Collegiate P, 1923. Print.

Boas, Franz. “Kwakiutl Grammar with a Glossary of the Suffixes.” Ed. Helene Boas Yampolsky with the collaboration of Zellig S. Harris. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 37.3 (1947): 203-377. Print.

Boas, Franz. Vocabulary of the Kwakiutl Language. [Philadelphia?]: n.p., n.d. (Caption title: “Read before the American Philosophical Society, November 18, 1892). 34-82. Print.

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“Chaser, n.1.” OED Online. Oxford UP, Sept. 2019. Web. 20 Oct. 2019.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-Ameri-can Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.

Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.

“Glossary, n.1.” OED Online. Oxford UP, Sept. 2019. Web. 20 Oct. 2019.

Goody, Jack. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Print.

Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. 1977. Ur-bana: U of Illinois P, 1980. Print.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Book of Harlem.” Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Sto-ries. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 979-84. Print.

---. “Drenched in Light.” Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 940-48. Print.

---. “Harlem Slanguage.” Zora Neale Hurston: The Complete Stories. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. 227-32. Print.

---. “John Redding Goes to Sea.” Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 925-39. Print.

---. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 1-171. Print.

---. “Monkey Junk.” African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Ap-proaches, New Challenges. Eds. Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors. Spec. issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies 55.4 (2010): 570-75. Print.

---. Mules and Men. Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Wri-tings. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 1-267. Print.

---. “Story in Harlem Slang.” Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 1001-10. Print.

---. “The Book of Harlem.” African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges. Eds. Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sol-lors. Spec. issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies 55.4 (2010): 566-69. Print.

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---. “The Bone of Contention.” Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Library of America, 1995. 968-78. Print.

James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Holt, 1890. Print.

Kaplan, Carla, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Double-day, 2002. Print.

King, Charles. The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture. London: The Bodley Head, 2019. Print.

Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. Print.

Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: William Morrow, 1928. Print.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Lon-don: Routledge, 1982. Print.

Reichard, Gladys A. Wiyot Grammar and Texts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1925. Print.

Zora Neale Hurston est généralement considérée comme une écrivaine régionaliste dont le travail s’inspire fortement de ses expériences dans la communauté entièrement noire d’Eatonville, en Floride. Les critiques lisent souvent son travail d’un point de vue esthétique et louent ses interprétations authentiques du discours vernaculaire noir et du folklore afro-américain. Dans cette contribution, on propose d’envisager Hurston sous un autre angle : Zora, la scientifique littéraire et traductrice. Encouragée par ses écrits en dialecte, elle a non seulement découvert que l’acte de lire implique un processus de traduction, mais elle a également remarqué l’aspect visuel de l’écriture et a « joué » avec des marques typographiques non orales dans ses premières nouvelles avant de commencer à étudier la pratique d’établir des listes. Ayant découvert des glossaires au cours de ses études d’anthropologie à Barnard College, Hurston a commencé à les mettre en œuvre dans ses premiers écrits, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) et Mules and Men (1935). En 1942, elle a développé un scénario ambivalent dans lequel le glossaire non publié intitulé “Harlem Slanguage” serait le résultat de sa chaîne de pensée associative et hautement subjective (ou « courant de pensée, de conscience » [James 293]), tandis que le “Glossary of Harlem Slang” publié et classé par ordre alphabétique, s’adresse lui au grand public.

ANTHROPOGENIC CLIMATE CHANGE CONDENSED: CREATING COMMUNITY IN VERY SHORT PLAYS

Climate Change dRama and Climate Change theatRe aCtion (CCta)

Research on ‘cli-fi’ or climate fiction is a growing field within ecocritical literary studies (see Leikam and Leyda; Löschnigg and Braunecker). Compared to the extensive research published on climate fiction, very little work has been done on drama and theater, even though ecocritical approaches have a strong foothold in theater studies (see Arons and May; Gray). In a condensed and early attempt at sketching several recurring features of climate change drama, Adeline Johns-Putra suggests that such plays tend to “refer to a disastrous climatic event,” depict “the psychological implications of climate change,” and “frame personal engagement with climate change in terms of intergenerational relationships” (for further discussion, see Balestrini, “Cli-fi Drama”). This does not, however, solve the central problem that distinguishes plays on specific environmental disasters from plays that address climate change. Una Chaudhuri and Shonnie Enelow write:

The first thing that makes climate change difficult to represent in art is the maddening fact that climate—unlike weather—can never be directly experienced. As the aggregation of numerous atmospheric and weather phenomena, climate does not manifest itself in any single moment, event, or location. The only way it can be apprehended is through data and modeling—through systems and mediations—all of which have to be processed cognitively and intellectually: have to, in short, be understood, rather than experienced, phenomenologically and temporally. (23)

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Similarly, Sylvia Mayer characterizes climate change as “intangible” and “invisible,” as “laten[t]” and “hidden” from view (103). The intermedial nature of drama and theater highlights the dilemma particularly clearly because the verbal text has to meet the challenges of representation as much as of the visual, aural, and kinetic elements of the performance.

What, then, can climate change literature and, in particular, theater do? How can the limited scope of a literary work or a performance represent the immense time frame of what Rob Nixon designates as “slow violence” (14)? John M. Meyer argues that “[c]limate change and other global environmental changes are a deep challenge to our way of life. Yet they rarely resonate deeply with our everyday lives” (71). As it would be futile for artistic works to try and represent climate change per se, and as the real problem is to make climate change resonate with art consumers, Meyer suggests that artists need to illustrate how “environmental concerns” are inextricably interlaced with “social” concerns and that such interlacing characterizes “everyday” situations (75; also see 77). Complementing Meyer’s perspective, Julie Sze demands that we “inject a different way of looking at climate change, one that highlights different ways of knowing and different ways of being in the world” (“Environmental Justice” 93).

As these scholars show, the impossibility of perceiving climate change challenges artists to do two things: first, to shift the work of representation towards showing the social, everyday dimensions of climate change. Second, to encourage their recipients to reconsider well-established practices of perception and to experiment with new practices of sensory experience. Both of these points cohere with Jacques Rancière’s definition of what he calls “[c]ritical art”:

art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of ‘strangeness’; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness. (142)

Rancière’s poignant triad appears rather suitable for climate change drama because he envisions an activist response that connects the sensory imaginary of art with, as he says, “the world,” which I choose to read as implying a community (of those affected by climate change in a specific location, of climate change activists, and so on) as well as an ecological system.

The impossibility of representing climate change in any mimetic sense has led climate change-focused playwrights to try and foster awareness of climate change by providing new perceptions of who or what is affected in which way. The ability to produce “strangeness” through “new perceptions” in the theater is thus used as a trigger for further contemplation. And such contemplation is, sometimes very directly and sometimes more subtly, linked to agency and activism. Moreover, the impossibility of putting climate on the

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stage has resulted in foregrounding communication about climate change by portraying specific social situations in which dramatic characters present and exchange ideas and opinions about climate change. The plays in the corpus under scrutiny in this essay represent an extreme form of negotiating the immensity of climate change because they are very brief performances of approximately five minutes each. This has resulted in numerous monologues or dialogues which, as projected by some of the theorists discussed above, foreground everyday communicative situations and character constellations as well as the emotionally engaging strategy of beginning in medias res—more often than not right in the middle of a conflict situation.

All of these plays are commissioned contributions to climate change theater activism that have been created since 2015. Artists in Canada and the United States jointly initiated a movement called Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) in order to raise public awareness of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21). Between November 1 and December 12, 2015, more than eighty registrants in twenty-six countries presented readings, performances, and adaptations of the fifty short plays, performance poems, songs, etc., that artists from various countries provided for the purpose (CCTA 2015). CCTA events were hosted in public or private places, in educational institutions, at festivals, and at myriad other occasions. Between the beginning of October and the middle of November 2017, nearly 140 CCTA collaborators in twenty-three countries (among them organizers in forty-one out of the fifty states of the US) hosted dozens of events. Again, CCTA activists made selections from a corpus of fifty works provided by artists affiliated predominately with Canada and the United States, including indigenous peoples, but beyond North America also with Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Columbia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe (CCTA 2017). The CCTA plays 2017 were published as an anthology (Bilodeau, Where). The fall of 2019 saw the next iteration of CCTA. This time, playwrights were commissioned to focus on exemplary climate heroines and heroes who, as the theme reads, are “Lighting the Way” (CCTA) towards a hopefully sustainable future.

CommuniCating Climate Change

Characters: Beyond Anthropocentrism

The first step in evoking strangeness, which climate change theater shares with other dramatic works that address environmental issues, consists in developing non-human dramatic characters such as future life forms, personified

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allegorical figures like Mother Earth, or animals. Seeing these characters as non-human demands from the audience the willingness to suspend their disbelief in order to perceive difference in anthropomorphic forms of representation.

It is difficult to create truly evocative and potentially perception-changing strangeness through, for instance, short plays in which a woman wearing a white coat embodies the last polar bear on this planet or in which a single bee presents itself as a spokesperson, or rather, spokes-insect for its species. The difficulty resides in the fact that these animals-played-by-humans assume verbal aesthetics derived from human contexts and human codes of self-expression. Thus, in Lenora Champagne’s “Interview with a Polar Bear” (2015), a polar bear named Priscilla speaks rather poetically, using numerous assonances and alliterations, and ultimately transforms into a constellation in the night sky. 1 The lyrical qualities of her utterances and her ascension into the firmament may be intended to trigger a sense of awe and nostalgia. By contrast, in Mindi Dickstein’s “Starving to Death in Midtown” (2015), a bee addresses the audience as a representative of its “people,” paraphrases a newspaper report on a scientific paper that analyzes the plight of bees dying of various poisons, and primarily spouts sarcastically inflected jargon related to imperialism and warfare, referring to objects that bees “colonize” and to their “massive, soul-sucking suicide mission.” Ultimately, the somewhat heroic but simultaneously doomed vociferous insect eventually self-identifies as “the last bee standing.” Whether nostalgia or humor actually achieve the desired effect on the audience will presumably depend on how each short performance is contextualized. At the very least, the anthropomorphic physical appearance and language encourage viewers to draw parallels to human suffering.

One strategy to avert responses that restrict themselves to nostalgia or laughter is self-reflexive drama. In Jessica Litwak’s “The Narcissism of Small Differences” (2018), the shortness of the mini play is echoed in the situation on stage: in the first half of the scene, an environmentalist is given three minutes to plead the case for two dying species in front of a disgruntled and fatalistic representative of the destructive capitalist economic system. The brevity of the presentation implicitly comments on the time constraints of CCTA plays in contrast to the vastness of the problem they address. The environmentalist’s futile plea also contrasts with the second section of the scene, which presents a dialogue between two endangered animals. Having concluded that humans “think we are not like them” (Litwak 191), the animals decide that they will set out to convince humans otherwise by spreading scientific knowledge, by fostering empathy with suffering animals, and by promoting new ways of seeing. Thus, the onus of raising awareness and of suggesting new sensory

1. All CCTA plays of the years 2015 and 2019 are unpublished manuscripts at this point; thus, no page numbers can be provided. The author would like to thank playwright and CCTA co-founder Chantal Bilodeau for granting access to both corpora.

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imaginaries is on the endangered creatures themselves who assume agency in cross-species communication for the sake of the common good.

A rather innovative approach to addressing alienation strategies is central to Elaine Ávila’s “The Rookery: A Play for Steller Sea Lions” (2019). Both speaking characters are sea lions, but one—Brunhilda—has grown up and lives in the wild, whereas the other one—Sitka—was raised by humans and has been trained so that she can be used for research purposes. Whereas Sitka has a “weird . . . accent” and has never learned how to hunt for her own sustenance, she is aware of the dangers of plastics in the ocean and understands what human researchers are trying to do in order to rescue wild seals who are threatened by suffocation. Sitka’s liminal position of not knowing enough about the ways of seals in the wild and of knowing enough about humans to appreciate how they care for her effectively troubles categories of ostensibly given or at least stable naturalness and belonging as much as it softens the human–animal boundary. In terms of performance, a character like Sitka, the human-trained research-assistant seal, certainly encourages recipients to look beyond anthropomorphism and reductive dichotomies.

Significantly, the CCTA 2019 corpus also includes Katie Pearl’s “Earth’s Blue Heart” which argues in favor of reading indigenous fishing rights not primarily as a matter of ownership and economics but rather as an ontological issue. Rejecting a solely market-oriented approach to fishing rights, the nameless characters promote a sense of cross-species relationality that they jointly experience once they have arrived in the symbolic core of Planet Earth. This relational focus is not, however, presented as emotional and philosophical only. It rather leads to the conclusion that “[h]ope is not something you feel, it’s something you do.” As a result, even a sense of ontological oneness with creation must be coupled with action if it is to propel the characters towards the future.

Forms of Dialogue

In the CCTA plays discussed here and in tune with Meyer’s concept of “resonance” as a crucial factor in effective climate change communication through the arts, some plays focus on everyday communicative situations. Contemplating climate change communication and its desired impact on perception and behavior frequently relies on everyday constellations such as one-on-one conversations of two dramatic characters or, simulating the possibility of communicative exchange, monologues by a dramatic character with explicit references to audience members as specifically defined types of addressees. Thus, various plays present friends, lovers, or family members who, at first, are at odds with one another regarding a plan of action or inaction when contemplating climate change. More often than not, such scenes end with the shared resolution to become active together, thus confirming that activism works better if one has associates pursuant of the same goals.

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In contrast to optimistic calls for activism based on shared perceptions and social interdependence, Andrea Lepcio’s “Alone” (2015) juxtaposes an unnamed “Woman” who represents the socioeconomic status of the “1%” with disembodied “Voices” that partially echo her words or ask questions which indicate that they have given up the fight. 2 This scene counteracts any murkily romanticized notions of community-building by claiming that this particular one-percenter mainly enjoys the relative safety of her isolation on both “high” and “dry” ground, and that her sense of entitlement shields her from feeling compassion or responsibility towards those who may be drowning in an unspecified realm of climate change-induced environmental disaster.

In Chantal Bilodeau’s “Homo Sapiens” (2018), two representatives of more evolved humanoids stare at, comment on, and try to touch and feed the homines sapientes in the audience while observing them like rare animals exhibited in a zoo. The closing soliloquy of one of these more highly developed humans acknowledges the weirdness of looking at one’s own future or past (depending on the direction of the gaze) and consolingly adds that homines sapientes probably tried their best but were nevertheless wiped out, as predicted in Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 non-fiction monograph The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. In Bilodeau’s short play, audience members vicariously experience their transformation into members of a species that has lost out and is anything but powerful. The sensory form of pushing this awareness, then, is the alienating situation of encountering “humans” of a different kind and time frame while also becoming the observed rather than the observer.

The illusion of communication in dialogue becomes clear in Brian Dykstra’s “Two Voices” (2019), a short piece of Spoken Word poetry that begins with a fifty-line solo by “First Voice” and subsequently alternates between “First Voice” and “Second Voice.” These alternating voices do not respond to one another. Instead, each one speaks a coherent text that evolves parallel to the other speaker’s text. This implicitly demands from listeners that they can process two verbal tracks by oscillating between them. In the final fifth of the scene, the voices come together by jointly speaking five verses and then enunciating lines that intersect closely in their trajectory, if not necessarily syntactically. Whereas before the set of five shared lines the “Second Voice” was decidedly more pessimistic than the “First Voice” and more dismissive of humans’ capacity to change for the better, the closing of the short play has both voices encourage activism.

This same shift from contrasting perspectives to a shared determination to “[b]e revolutionaries” is also at the core of Bilodeau’s “It Starts with Me” (2019), albeit with a completely different method. Unnamed actors speak

2. Similarly, Joan Lipkin’s “About That Chocolate Bar . . .” (2019) stages a surreal dialogue between a woman living on Earth in the present and a Spirit representing the Amazon River as a cocoa-producing region.

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various lines by unnamed “Single Voice[s]” as well as “Multiple Voices,” repeating “[i]t starts with me!” and presenting an avalanche of causal sub-clauses (“Because . . .”). Eventually, each repetition of “[i]t starts with me!” and of “[m]e!” is accompanied by an emphatic “stomp.” After a silent caesura, a “Single Voice” articulates: “It starts with me / Because without me there is no salvation for anyone / or the planet,” and the scene concludes with the actors and—if deemed appropriate—audience members exchanging hugs. The emotional build-up merges a focus on the individual as the point of departure for action with a focus on community building around the data-driven awareness of the situation of women all over the globe. Similar to the permeable zone connecting different states of being, Dykstra and Bilodeau transfer the discursive activity and, by implication, the power of the dramatic voices to the audience in order to create activism-oriented momentum.

The dialogues in these CCTA plays range from intimate conversations between twenty-first-century human earthlings to vistas of our own extinction as perceived from the future, via depictions of an ecological divide. Furthermore, dialogues depict simultaneously evolving discourses which only intersect aurally during the experience of the play. They also break the fourth-wall illusion and elicit participatory mechanisms for the sake of encouraging a sense of responsibility that can spark activism. These dramatic pieces thus already offer glimpses of the ways in which climate change plays negotiate the relations among the local, the regional, and the global, and how they address climate change as an issue in community formation.

Local, Regional, Global: Settings and Scales

Applying René Dubos’s slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally” (qtd. in Di Chiro 206) to climate change drama makes us think about possible settings. Which types of settings are the most appropriate ones, if a play is to create resonance through depicting everyday social situations, to change perceptions, to de-naturalize engrained ways of seeing and understanding, and to inspire activism? How can a short play effectively address a global phenomenon as well as its local impacts in five minutes?

Giovanna Di Chiro argues that awareness of multiple coexisting scales and of their competing perceptive frames can encourage holistic, non-anthropocentric perspectives in which Planet Earth, all living beings, and all elements (like air and water) are considered (204). By thinking in a “multiscalar” (206) way, she argues, we can overcome the limits of old-fashioned sustainability thinking. Thus, as encapsulated in ecocritic Ursula Heise’s notion of a “sense of planet,” Di Chiro explains, “we need to develop such a scale-crossing environmental consciousness in order to reduce or prevent global catastrophes like climate change” (206). Such thinking can lead to what she dubs “grassroots ecocosmopolitanism” (207)—a phrase that

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redefines cosmopolitanism as a descriptor of the pleasure travels of the rich. Its new meaning refers to multiscalar, simultaneously local and global, inherently intersectional thinking (Di Chiro 207).

These concepts merge in Bilodeau’s monologue “Mother” (2015), in which a physically suffering Mother Earth addresses humankind as her offspring with whom she wants to re-establish an empathy-based relationship. Mother Earth contrasts the coincidental evolution of human beings with their characteristic of being strong-willed “beasts” full of hubris; she hints at how the immense age of the Earth reduces the era of humanity’s existence to a “geological flicker.” Thus, the Anthropocene is dwarfed by the evocation of a much more extensive scale. The solution that Mother Earth envisions is that humanity and Planet Earth should not be perceived as separate entities, but as forming an undivided household. Thus, this short monologue addresses scales of time and space that need to be perceived interdependently and simultaneously; in the process, Mother Earth aims at de-naturalizing dichotomies and perception-based practices in order to re-instate harmonious interrelations within the ecosystem.

Another method of multiscalar thinking which occurs in several CCTA plays is to address the links between, on the one hand, anthropogenic climate change and, on the other hand, the abundance or lack of water in different locations. As Sze has claimed regarding fiction that addresses water-related conflicts in the California Central Valley and around the US-Mexican border, water rights are tightly linked with environmental justice issues that reveal intersectional fault lines, many of which were caused by neoliberal economic structures (“Boundaries” 132, 138, 140-42). Two performance pieces in the CCTA corpora pinpoint the centrality of water by selecting a private bathroom as a setting in order to present the clash between limited natural resources and the demands that Western civilization and its lifestyle make on water supplies and water usage in residential areas. On top of that, both pieces raise ethical questions regarding access, empathy, sharing, and survival.

In Olivier Mayer’s pantomimed scene entitled “Water” (2015), a man comes home from work. He can neither wash his hands nor flush the toilet for lack of running water. He drinks some beer, and then repurposes his beverage for hand-washing—but not for flushing. When he manages to coax a single drop of water out of the faucet into a glass, he resists the urge to drink it and rather waters a plant with it. Cross-species empathy extending from human to plant is thus presented as a nutshell solution.

By contrast, Arthur Kopit’s “Where Has All the Water Gone?” (2015) is set in an exaggeratedly luxurious bathroom in a Bel Air mansion. The titular allusion to the anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (a song that began its career with Pete Seeger’s 1955 version and went through various expansions) implicitly calls to mind the drastic conflicts produced by the economics and politics of access to water. It thus may prepare audiences for

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the satirical bent of this one-man show, in which communication takes the form of a telephone conversation with a call-center employee located far, far away from the Bel Air setting.

The protagonist’s sense of entitlement, of having “earned” the right to use and waste as much water as he wants, culminates in two potentially perception-changing details. First, the protagonist admittedly has no understanding of the decidedly underprivileged circumstances in which the person at the other end of the telephone line lives and simply insists on his own superior right to an essential, life-giving service like running water. Secondly, the desperate protagonist realizes that he cannot even commit suicide by swallowing a handful of pills because he does not have water to wash them down. Rather than suffocating, though, he decides to cough up the pills and go on living.

More importantly, Kopit’s depiction of water as an essential necessity effectively evokes issues of environmental justice in which, for instance, the protracted impact of contaminated water on human populations is analogous to the long-term perspective needed to grasp climate change (Sze, “Boundaries” 132, 138, 140). As Sze writes,

[i]n crossing political boundaries, water symbolizes the contested politics and the geographic and cultural spaces between nations and communities that hold vastly unequal power. Water also represents complex forms of violence as a result of large-scale economic development and the cultural changes this development ushers in . . . (132)

She continues,

[l]ike Wilson’s notion of “slow death” in discussing climate change . . . the persistent patterns of water contamination and destruction are not accidental but instead endemic and embedded in systems of exploitation, heightened in an era of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism idealizes market and capital, and consumer subjectivities over that of communitarian notions of belonging or justice. (142)

Thus, even a scene set in a fictional bathroom can evoke large-scale interdependent predicaments and encourage changed perceptions about these predicaments and their implications.

An Aesthetics of Multiscalar Temporal Conciseness

In his introduction to the conference proceedings of the 2002 annual convention of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE), Jochen Achilles comments on the conference theme, “Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English”:

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The conference . . . addressed the tensions and interrelations between globalizing and localizing tendencies in contemporary drama, between the economic and political drive towards uni(formi)ty and standardization on the one hand and, on the other, the resistance to such homogenization by specific regional, ethnic, gender or social groups . . . (9)

Achilles also calls to mind Fredric Jameson’s arguments “that there are two major aspects of globalization which tend to collapse into each other and yet form dialectic contradictions, namely, the economic and the cultural aspect” (12) and that the rhetoric of globalization may oscillate between, reveal, and hide its economic or cultural implications.

Nearly two decades later, we find ourselves in an era in which the corpus of climate change drama and theater is continuously expanding. At the same time, the gamut from local to global concerns has evolved into a growing awareness of the necessity to consider narrow and broad perspectives simultaneously as well as in all of their intersectional and, indeed, cross-species facets. Di Chiro’s “multiscalar” approach facilitates discussing climate change communication through theater as a form of artistic activism that fosters a sense of “ecocosmopolitanism” and thus links socioeconomics, environmental justice, and a call for activism. Boundary-crossings transcend the traditional triad of intersectionality by replacing anthropocentrism with a posthuman planetary outlook which requires recalibrating our definition of community.

In this sense, climate change dramas like the ones discussed here enact what Rancière has described as being characteristic of the political: “Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the ‘natural’ order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific ‘bodies,’ that is, to specific ways of being, seeing and saying” (139). By dissolving the dividing lines between the human and the non-human, between the powerful and the oppressed, and between the performers and the viewers/listeners, the brief climate change dramas of CCTA strive to de-naturalize socially constructed norms and to closely align theater aesthetics and ethics. They thus promote a new sense of community and belonging that acknowledges interdependence and multiscalar perception, and that situates the materially and sensorily elusive predicament of climate change within the social—ranging from the inner sanctum of a private home to the shared planet as a whole.

In which sense, then, does the shortness of the CCTA plays contribute to making these plays trigger a sense of social community in a specific performance ecology? In her provocative monograph on how a new kind of formalism can allow scholars of literature and culture to grasp aesthetic and social/political forms simultaneously, Caroline Levine muses about the “affordances” of specific forms, namely, about their “particular constraints and possibilities . . . and the fact that . . . patterns and arrangements carry their

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affordances with them as they move across time and space” (6). In order to make it possible to perform the CCTA plays in a potentially unlimited number of locations (“across . . . space”), each respective set of the fifty plays would have to offer enough variety to accommodate the environments and communities in which they would potentially be presented. Audiences anywhere might possibly agree that the central affordance of five-minute plays is their time limit. And this brings us back to Levine’s interest in reading aesthetic and political forms simultaneously: She argues that studying “social models of institutional time” (66), such as conventions regarding business hours or the academic calendar, facilitates understanding the competition between different time regimes as well as their malleability in the long run.

Minimalist art forms are a case in point. Detractors of very short plays have criticized them as insufficient in depth and development. In contrast, promoters have argued that “[t]he thinner the realistic slice of life, the more easily we see through it and catch glimmers of abstract or existential concerns” (Muse 9), and that “[w]hether microdramas cram proportionally more information into less time, or leave so much unsaid that they force spectators to supplement the play with their imaginations, they often demand concentrated and consistent attention” (13). Both the emphasis on matters of survival and the appeal to intensely focused engagement within a short time span apply to the short performance pieces discussed here. While they strive to be adaptable in the sense that the playwrights are encouraged to write with an unfathomable variety of sociopolitical performance contexts of local organizers in mind, the CCTA plays are also geared towards using climate change as the thematic point of departure for creating a sense of community—sharing the local/regional/global predicament and assuming responsibility for one’s actions.

Nassim Winnie Balestrini University of Graz, Austria

WORKS CITED

Achilles, Jochen. “Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English: An Introduction.” Global Challenges and Regional Res-ponses in Contemporary Drama in English. Eds. Jochen Achilles, Ina Berg-mann, Birgit Däwes. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003. 9-27. Print.

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Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J. May. Readings in Performance and Ecology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Ávila, Elaine. “The Rookery: A Play for Steller Sea Lions.” Unpublished manus-cript, CCTA 2019.

Balestrini, Nassim. “Cli-fi Drama and Performance.” Amerikastudien/Ameri-can Studies 62.1 (2017): 114-20. Print.

Bilodeau, Chantal. “Homo Sapiens.” Where Is the Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays. Ed. Chantal Bilodeau. [Toronto]: The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, 2018. 86-90. Print.

---. “It Starts with me.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

---. “Mother.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

---, ed. Where Is the Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays. [To-ronto]: The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, 2018. Print.

Champagne, Lenora. “Interview with a Polar Bear.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Chaudhuri, Una, and Shonni Enelow. “Theorizing Ecocide: The Theatre of Eco-cruelty.” Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook. Eds. Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

CCTA 2015. Web. 22 July 2019.

CCTA 2017. Web. 22 July 2019.

Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Climate Justice Now!: Imagining Grassroots Ecocosmo-politanism.” American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons. Eds. Joni Adamson and Kimberly N. Ruffin. New York: Routledge, 2012. 205-19. Print.

Dickstein, Mindi. “Starving to Death in Midtown.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Dykstra, Brian. “Two Voices.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

Gray, Nelson. “The Dwelling Perspective in English-Canadian Drama.” Gree-ning the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context. Eds. Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2013. 511-26. Print.

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Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Ima-gination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Johns-Putra, Adeline. “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Cli-Fi, Climate Change Theater and Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate Change Criticism.” WIREs Climate Change 7.2 (April/March 2016). Web. 22 July 2019.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt, 2014. Print.

Kopit, Arthur. “Where Has All the Water Gone?” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Leikam, Susanne, and Julia Leyda, eds. “What’s in a Name?”: Cli-fi and Ame-rican Studies. Extended Forum. Amerikastudien/American Studies 62.1 (2017): 109-38. Print.

Lepcio, Andrea. “Alone.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2015. Print.

“Lighting the Way.” CCTA. Web. 22 July 2019.

Lipkin, Joan. “About That Chocolate Bar . . .” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

Litwak, Jessica. “The Narcissism of Small Differences.” Where Is the Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays. Ed. Chantal Bilodeau. [To-ronto]: The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, 2018. 186-92. Print.

Löschnigg, Maria, and Melanie Braunecker. Green Matters: Ecocultural Func-tions of Literature. Amsterdam: Brill, forthcoming. Print.

Mayer, Olivier. “Water.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Mayer, Sylvia. “Risk Narratives: Climate Change, the American Novel, and the World Risk Society.” America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Envi-ronment. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 97-118. Print.

Meyer, John M. “Denialism versus the Resonance Dilemma in the US.” Ameri-ca After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 66-82. Print.

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Muse, John H. Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2017. Print.

Nixon, Rob. “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13.2-14.1 (2006-2007): 14-37. Web. 25 July 2019.

Pearl, Katie. “Earth’s Blue Heart.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Ed. and trans. Ste-phen Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. Print.

Sze, Julie. “Boundaries of Violence: Water, Gender, and Development in Context.” American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons. Eds. Joni Adamson and Kim-berly N. Ruffin. New York: Routledge, 2012. 131-43. Print.

---. “Environmental Justice and Environmental Humanities in the Anthro-pocene.” America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Braun. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 83-96. Print.

Contrairement aux tremblements de terre ou aux tsunamis, le climat en tant que tel ne se laisse pas cerner au travers d’événements singuliers. Néanmoins, le monde du théâtre ne s’est pas gardé de frayer, en matière de représentation, des voies expérimentales aptes à aborder la question du changement climatique, et ce bien souvent dans une perspective militante. Tous les deux ans depuis 2015, le Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) subventionne cinquante pièces courtes auprès de dramaturges de tous horizons. Amateurs et professionnels ont ainsi pu s’inscrire auprès du CCTA pour participer aux représentations des œuvres sélectionnées partout dans le monde. Les textes brefs abordés ici, que l’on doit à des auteurs basés aux États-Unis, témoignent des stratégies dont ceux-ci font usage afin de porter sur scène des facteurs environnementaux et géographiques, de façon à mettre en avant la nécessité d’un effort collectif. Ces pièces courtes font un usage opérant de lieux allégoriques comme de cadres géographiques bien précis et redéfinissent les conceptions anthropocentriques de la communauté en brisant les barrières entre nature anthropisée et monde non-humain. Enfin, ces pièces expérimentent également avec l’échelle, tantôt élargie, tantôt contractée, à laquelle sont envisagés changement climatique et capacités d’action.

AMERICAN LITERARY SHORT FORMS AND THEIR NEGOTIATIONS OF THE LOCAL

AND THE GLOBAL: A RESPONSE

enviRonmentaliSm betWeen eCoCentRiSm and anthRoPoCentRiSm

The debate about adequate attitudes towards the environment unfolds and develops between two fundamental poles. One of these poles can be described as anthropocentrism, a position that argues that the outer world cannot but be viewed and treated from a decidedly human perspective, while the ecocentrist counter position holds that humans have to become aware of, and acknowledge, their embeddedness in the environment. The debate between Leo Marx and Lawrence Buell—marked by their seminal studies on the relationship between nature and culture from Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) to Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1995), Writing for an Endangered World (2001), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005)—demarcates and defines this contested field.

Marx argues that the relationship of humans and nature will always be conditional and dialectic, never direct, as humans remain caught up in their modes of perception and thought. Although the interrelations between humans, nature, and civilization may change, the centrality of the human position and perspective is not in question for Marx. Advocating the notion “that the interests of humans are of higher priority than those of nonhumans” (Buell, Future 134), Marx fulfils Buell’s definition of homo- or anthropocentrism, while Buell himself sides with ecocentrism, “the view in environmental ethics that the interest of the ecosphere must override that of the interest of individual species” (Future 137). From an environmentalist perspective, Buell develops

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an approach that reinforces the dominance of nature as the basis of human civilization and thereby criticizes Marx’s alleged anthropocentric bias. Buell replaces Marx’s anthropocentrism, which puts humans first, by an ecocentrism, which puts nature first. While Buell’s ecocentrism tends in the direction of a posthumanist stance—embraced by Ursula Heise and others—that considers humans as one element within a diversity of ecological forces, Marx refuses to give up an anthropocentric position that denies the possibility of approaching nature in and by itself. In a 1999 “Exchange on Thoreau” in The New York Review of Books, Marx responds to a statement by Buell. He reformulates his convictions about what he calls the pastoral ideal, which is informed by “the yearning for a simpler, more harmonious style of life, an existence ‘closer to nature’” (Machine 6) and constitutes itself as the mediation between two forms of otherness, the force of nature and the counterforce of technology (Machine 378). Responding to Buell’s ecocentric stance, Marx insists:

The Pastoral is an unequivocally anthropocentric mode. To writers and artists who work in it, nonhuman nature is interesting chiefly (or only) so far as it bears on human experience. (Homo sapiens is trapped, presumably, like all species, in the inescapable narcissism of species being.) Thus the pastoral view of life is consonant with the uniqueness of humanity’s situation. Although we are inextricably enmeshed in nonhuman nature, our manifest power to modify it exceeds that of most other species by orders of magnitude. (“An Exchange on Thoreau” 4)

For Marx the pastoral is attitudinal rather than ontological. The importance of the interrelation between humans and non-human nature resides not so much in its concrete historical realization in the outside world but rather in its manifestation as an emotional inner complex that mediates between spontaneous urges and social necessities and thereby generates both individual and communal identities. Marx’s pastoralism emerges as an always preliminary and precarious, unstable, and revisable attempt at resolving the conflict between humans and non-human nature by a somewhat regressive flight of the imagination, manifesting itself in metaphors and symbols rather than real movement (Machine 9-10). By contrast, Buell favors the investigation of “literature’s capacity for articulating the nonhuman environment” (Imagination 10). His stance gives priority to nature both as decentering human hegemony and as being endowed with a quasi-subjective core or essence: “ecocentric literary vision may express itself both as a critique of the centrality and even the legitimacy of human assertion . . . and as an ascription of something like human subjectiveness to the nonhuman world . . . ” (143). Promoting an “Aesthetics of Relinquishment” (143-79), Buell distinguishes between two modes in which humans should yield to nature. The first is a shedding of consumerist gadgetry, a reduction of civilizational impact. The second form of relinquishment amounts to a dissolution of subjectivity in nature: “The more

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radical relinquishment is to give up individual autonomy itself, to forgo the illusion of mental and even bodily apartness from one’s environment” (144; see also Achilles). In this special section, Nassim Winnie Balestrini’s contribution on creating community in microplays thematizing anthropogenic climate change demonstrates the dialectics of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, as gestures of relinquishment to the environment are inescapably both enacted by human agents and endowed with human emotions. In the microplays commissioned by the activist group Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), humans are sandwiched between animals that speak and androids who regard them as earthlings. Nevertheless, these representations of the relinquishment of human agency remain the result of human agency as well.

(CRitiCal) Region(aliSm) and (naRRativeS oF) Community: negotiationS oF embeddedneSS and alienation

The concepts of both region and community, as well as local color fiction and narratives of community, the genres that focus on them, participate in the debate of either ecocentrist or anthropocentrist approaches to ecological balance. Seminal regionalist as well as ecocritical texts of the nineteenth century, such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), are often read as critiques of industrialization and functional societal interrelations generating alienation. Buell is fascinated by texts, such as Thoreau’s Walden, John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968), and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), that do not follow an arbitrary aesthetic structure but rather the seasonal cycle as a non-man-made ordering principle, “texts that rely on nature’s motions to provide the central organizing device. As such they shed further light on the central question of just how far the human imagination is prepared to be drawn away from anthropocentrism, to enter imaginatively into a realm where human concerns are no longer central” (Imagination 220). In “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre” (1988), Sandra A. Zagarell interprets Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs as a prototypical “narrative of community,” in which a preindustrial rural environment forms the background to human interaction, celebrating both the solidarity of remote island communities and communal involvement in domesticity: “the narrative does not feature individualized lives but develops an interdependent community network in which characters are portrayed with reference to how they intersect with and maintain the community” (519).

Ecocentrist embeddedness of humanity in nature thus finds expression in the foregrounding of both regional and communal determinants of existence. As anthropocentrist arguments concerning the allegedly inevitable

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dominance of homo sapiens question the feasibility of ecocentrism, dialectical conceptions of region and community raise doubts about their sustainability as protective cocoons and sanctuaries of authentic lifestyles. Regionalist fiction and narratives of community do not only touch upon the debate of anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism, they are also informed by the contemporary conflicts of the global and the local, static regional forms of self-definition versus the diversification of border-crossing mobility. At the end of the nineteenth century, under the growing impact of industrialization and urbanization and in the heyday of local color fiction, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) developed the sociological distinction between community, based on mutual bonds, and society, sustained and held together by more individualist, functional, and abstract ties. Whether the seemingly or really more authentic and unalienated life in preindustrial communities should be privileged over the rationality, anonymity, and emotional numbing modern societies hold in store still pervades contemporary debates surrounding critical regionalism versus transnational developments and global mobility.

Martin Heiddegger’s later philosophy emphasizes the ontological preponderance of situatedness, of delimited space as the basis of existence. In “Bauen Wohnen Denken” (1951), his treatise on building, dwelling, and thinking, being and existence manifest themselves in space and location. Heidegger defines being as building a dwelling in a specific space, suggesting an ontology of regionalism and communitarianism: “Dwelling, however, is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist.” 1 In his famous essay “Der Feldweg” (1949), translated as “The Fieldpath,” Heidegger suggests that these elementary insights to be gained peripatetically by walking a country path will endure even in the face of extinction. He is convinced that the mild power of the country path will overcome the giant force of nuclear energy: “But the few will everywhere be the abiding. From the gentle might of the Fieldpath they will some day be able to outlast the gigantic power of atomic energy, which human calculation has artifacted for itself and made into a fetter of its own doing.” 2 Heidegger’s position is surprisingly close to Thoreau’s in both Walden and “Walking” (1861) (Benesch, “Cultural Immobility” 411; Cavell).

In his 1963 essay “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” Heidegger’s contemporary Emmanuel Levinas opposes what he considers Heidegger’s quasi fascist provincialism and proclaims Jewish diasporic cosmopolitanism and mobility as the representative form of human existence. Levinas argues that if, like Heidegger, one posits the existential relevance of a specific home, one also posits the differentiation of natives and strangers—in other words,

1. “Das Wohnen aber ist der Grundzug des Seins, demgemäß die Sterblichen sind” (163).2. “Aber die Wenigen werden überall die Bleibenden sein. Sie vermögen einst aus der sanften Gewalt des Feldweges die Riesenkräfte der Atomenergie zu überdauern, die sich das men-schliche Rechnen erkünstelt und zur Fessel des eigenen Tuns gemacht hat” (5).

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xenophobia: “One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place, without which the universe would become insignificant and would scarcely exist, is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers” (232). Inspired by space travel, Levinas opts for the liberating power of technology, which in his opinion terminates the mystification of place and opens up interplanetary vistas of movement even beyond the boundaries of the earth, as demonstrated by the Russian cosmonaut Gagarin: “Technology does away with the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile. It goes beyond this alternative” (232). In one of his two groundbreaking essays on the discussion of cultural immobility and critical regionalism as counterforces to transnational acceleration, Klaus Benesch expertly summarizes these conflictual positions and their relevance for current debates of civilizational progress:

Heidegger’s and Levinas’ approach to place and the influence of technology on modern civilization differ in that the former stresses the importance of roots over routes and demonizes technology as a negative influence on humans and their relationship with the natural world. Levinas, on the other hand, not only distrusts Heidegger’s phenomenology of place, which he believes to be both naïve and dangerous because it widens the gap between natives and the Other, those who are exempt from the privilege of place. He also acknowledges the liberating potential of technology, of city life, and of itinerant, nomadic lifestyles, all of which necessitate human interaction and solidarity. Both positions have come to demarcate major fault lines in debates about the future of capitalism and modern societies; and both involve a wide range of issues, from mobility to land rights, from cultural heritage to transnational migration, from agriculture to delocalized, corporate forms of production. (“Space, Place, Narrative” 104-05)

Advocacy for both positions persists in contemporary cultural theory: transnational mobility provides chances for the establishment of widening global networks, but regional specificity remains a sanctuary of authenticity and substantiality. In his “Mobility Studies Manifesto,” Stephen Greenblatt emphasizes the inescapability of movement and the necessity of a dialectical view of, on the one hand, inter- and intracultural development and transformation and, on the other, rootedness and persistence: “A study of cultural mobility that ignores the allure (and, on occasion, the entrapment) of the firmly rooted misses the point,” he warns (252-53; see also Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction” 1-2, 16-17).

The dismantling of cultural uniformity necessitates some bond that is capable of holding together the differential qualities, which make up transnational cultural ensembles. In his regionalist manifesto architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton opposes the mobility and nomadism Greenblatt supports. Frampton deplores “the victory of universal civilization over locally inflected culture” (17) and criticizes the commodified abstractions of transnational societies, which threaten to drown out specific cultural

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ensembles. Not unlike Heidegger, Frampton warns against the catastrophic consequences of an all-too strict pursuit of the rationality of technological progress: “the trajectory of modernization has brought us to the threshold of nuclear war and the annihilation of the entire species. So too, avant-gardism can no longer be sustained as a liberative moment, in part because its initial utopian promise has been overrun by the internal rationality of instrumental reason” (19-20). In the wake of Heidegger, Frampton advocates spatial delimitation, “the absolute precondition of a bounded domain in order to create an architecture of resistance. Only such a defined boundary will permit the built form to stand against—and hence literally to withstand in an institutional sense—the endless processual flux of the Megalopolis” (24-25).

By contrast, Amy Kaplan insists on the embeddedness of the region in global dynamics and intercultural conflicts: “regions painted with ‘local color’ are traversed by the forgotten history of racial conflict with prior regional inhabitants, and are ultimately produced and engulfed by the centralized capitalist economy” (256). In their collection Critical Regionalism (2016), Klaus Lösch and Heike Paul similarly plead for a self-reflected and thereby self-critical form of regionalism, which takes into consideration the constructedness of both the local and the global:

In a constructivist paradigm, the region is no less an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson) than the nation, and any essentialist understanding of it as a defining factor in individual and collective identity formation must be analyzed as an expression of people’s longing for a localized version of ontological security, i.e. for a home and a homeland at hand, so to speak. (2)

As Rüdiger Kunow states in his essay on Jack London’s Hawai’ian tales, regionalism can be considered “intricately enmeshed in circuits of trade and diverse cultures in ways that belie its pretense at being ‘merely’ local in conception and subject matter.” Citing Neil Campbell’s study The Rhizomatic West (2008) as a demonstration of the multiple constructedness of a quintessentially significant American region, he opts for a dialectical understanding of regionalism that takes heed of the multifarious interrelations between the regionally specific and society at large.

Like regions, communities can be regarded either as Heideggerian fortifications against the modern onslaught of technology and commodification, which erodes existential ties, or as provisional ensembles that are shot through with signs of the decomposition of traditional values. Zagarell suggests that the preindustrial structures of community life can successfully counteract both the negative consequences of technological progress and the alienation of life in urban centers. With regard to a preindustrial interpersonal lifestyle, the narrative of community is restorative, not escapist, Zagarell claims:

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Works belonging to this ‘department of literature,’ like Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, take as their subject the life of a community (life in its ‘everyday aspects’) and portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community maintains itself as an entity. The self exists here as part of the interdependent network of the community rather than as an individualistic unit. Writers of narrative of community give literary expression to a community they imagine to have characterized the preindustrial era. Narrative of community thus represents a coherent response to the social, economic, cultural, and demographic changes caused by industrialism, urbanization, and the spread of capitalism. (499)

Zagarell considers the association of the narrative of community with the values and coherence of human interrelations in preindustrial societies as characteristic of women’s writing, especially in the late nineteenth century, as

women’s sphere retained much of the character of the preindustrial world well after the public, male world had been reorganized around the requirements of a market economy. Within the domestic sphere, moreover, women maintained a markedly interpersonal, affiliative orientation that may also have been characteristic of preindustrial life. (508)

This constitutes the “relational quality of women’s culture” (508).Zagarell regards the dispersion of the spirit of community into episodes

of individual triumph and failure in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as indicative of a wider trend towards “the individualistic tradition of the revolt from the village” (512-13). In more pronounced fashion, Thomas Yingling registers what he calls the end of collective experience in his essay on Winesburg, Ohio: “It was in the context of such a breakdown in collectivity and under the regime of these multiple alienations of modernity that Anderson sought in Winesburg to examine the experience of small-town America’s entry into a standardized, rationalized modern culture” (113-14). What remains of the former cohesion of the community is “the accidental or random fact of . . . geographical commonality” (114). Especially in the four-part story “Godliness,” Anderson juxtaposes regionally definable communal history with the encroachments of capitalism and technology, “an oral culture of proximity that is rapidly disappearing” with “a print culture (the culture of exchange) rapidly instituting itself as the agent of a ‘larger’ but less authentic culture of industrialism and distance” (125). More recent regionalist story collections, such as Dorothy Allison’s Trash (1995), set in South Carolina, or Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff (2008), set in Anderson’s Ohio, show this erosion of community in more drastic and violent forms. The essays on Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Jack London in this volume also demonstrate that regions and communities cannot simply be considered as antidotes for the inequalities produced by racism, capitalism, and imperialism. They are rather increasingly pervaded by the effects of national and global developments.

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the ContRibution oF thiS SPeCial SeCtion to the debate oF enviRonment, Region, and Community in ameRiCan liteRaRy ShoRt FoRmS

Christa Buschendorf’s essay on violence in the South, as exemplified in Charles W. Chesnutt’s short story “The Sheriff’s Children” (1889), highlights the conflictual interracial situation in “the unreconstructed South” (Walcott qtd. in Buschendorf) of the post-bellum period as well as the personal and private consequences of the era of slavery. In a sense, the story can be considered a companion piece to Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” (1893), as both texts address the socio-psychological consequences of miscegenation in the South. Buschendorf analyzes this complex story from the angle of the sociological perspective Chesnutt pursues in his writing. She tries to capture the prototypical post-bellum Southern configuration in the fictive community of Troy, where the story is set, with the help of Norbert Elias’s theorem of the established-outsider distinction.

In the story, Sheriff Campbell, a former Confederate officer, who initially opposed the secession movement, defends Tom, a black prisoner in the Troy jail, against a lynch mob of respectable citizens. Tom in all likelihood murdered a Civil War veteran revered by the white establishment and the enraged citizens are determined to kill him in retaliation. In his function as the defender of the law Campbell behaves impeccably. Although he shares the lynch mob’s disdain for the black man’s deed, he uses his legal authority to defend him. When he visits the black man in his cell, it transpires that Tom is Campbell’s illegitimate son. As an antebellum plantation owner, Campbell fathered him on a black slave and later sold both mother and son south for no good reason. When the prisoner threatens to shoot Campbell with his own revolver, Campbell’s daughter shoots at Tom, who is wounded and during the night kills himself in his cell by removing his bandages and bleeding to death—a move Buschendorf explains against the background of Schopenhauer’s will to live: “The psychological answer to the question why the former slave who repeatedly had experienced great suffering would at this point prefer to deny the powerful will to live is implied in the difference between the ’badge of degradation’ that society has forced him to wear and the individual lack of recognition he experiences in his father’s bearing towards him.”

The personal conflict between Campbell, who cannot bring himself not to think of his son as a mulatto, and Tom, who loses his will to live in the face of such paternal disregard, provides a counterpoint to Campbell’s probity as the legal authority who cuts the lynch mob short. In his function as sheriff, Campbell convincingly enforces equality before the law, the rule of the new era, against the members of his own class. Yet, as the father of a mixed-race son, he remains incapable of taking responsibility for his inhumane treatment of his mistress and son as commodities. In this respect, he cannot shake off the code of the Southern aristocracy, the attitudes and emotions of the plantation owner he once was.

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The dialectics of historical transition manifest themselves in his contradictory behavior. As Buschendorf brilliantly analyzes, defending the law without changing his ideology, Campbell leaves Elias’s “established-outsider figuration” intact and retains his entrenched conviction of the naturally privileged position of the Southern aristocracy. It is, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, this “Habitus” (qtd. in Buschendorf) which is responsible for the persistence of the oppression of colored people long after the official abolition of slavery.

Chesnutt’s sociological approach to both his short and long fiction uncovers these discrepancies between political theory and social practice. Chesnutt consciously deconstructs the modes and tropes of sentimentalizing plantation literature, which celebrates Southern patriarchy. The use of language and setting in his fiction is geared to render obvious the social and spatial distance between the races. As Buschendorf demonstrates by an analysis of Chesnutt’s essays, such as “What Is a White Man?” (1889) and “The Disenfranchisement of the Negro” (1903), Chestnutt is fully aware of the constructedness of ethnic identities and the ongoing disenfranchisement of African Americans. However, he also believes in the power of fiction to lead to reorientation in these respects. The regionalism of Chesnutt’s short fiction is in the service of laying bare the rifts in Southern communities, which are due to the legacy of interracial conflict. The region is not sentimentalized as in plantation fiction but rather considered a platform for the return of repressed emotions and the healing of traumatic experiences.

In different ways Carmen Birkle’s discussion of “Music, Magic, and Migration in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘The Foreigner’” probes into the implications of Jewett’s New England local color fiction with regard to intercultural relations and the reconciliation of selves and others. In this context Maine in the shape of Jewett’s setting of the rural community of Dunnet Landing turns into a laboratory and playing field for acting out the socio-psychological implications of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity, as the story describes

a form of transculturation, resulting from the intrusion of otherness into a community which, in spite of its attempts to preserve monoculturalism in almost nativist ways, gradually and imperceptibly turns transcultural although the “intruder” leaves the community. At least one member of the community actively adopts features of the outsider. (Birkle)

The essay analyzes this process of women-centered transculturation against the background of a Freudian understanding of the foreigner as representing what we repress in ourselves. In a postcolonial context, Julia Kristeva has similarly argued that “foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided” (181). Jewett’s story presents, and Birkle expertly dissects, the uncertainties and liminal positionings which, in Kristeva’s theory of otherness, result from such sameness in diversity:

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Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container, the memory of experiences when I had been abandoned overwhelm me, I lose my composure. I feel “lost,” “indistinct,” “hazy.” The uncanny strangeness allows for many variations: they all repeat the difficulty I have in situating myself with respect to the other. (187)

With regard to the significance and function of communities and regions what is noteworthy here is the fact that both region and community are not presented as sanctuaries for the preservation of specific identities but rather as partaking of the identity conflicts resulting from transnational interrelations. Both the region and the community appear as prisms of the conflictual dynamics which surround them rather than as protective fortifications against them. As Birkle aptly argues: “For Jewett, New England was the nation in a nutshell.” Her essay brilliantly discusses the consequences of this diagnosis against the background of its aesthetic, spiritual, historical, hegemonic, religious, moral, and gender-specific contexts.

In Jewett’s “The Foreigner,” the representation of otherness includes musical but also medical metaphorization. Foreign ways and mores are feared like a moral epidemic that may infect and erode the Puritanical community of Dunnet Landing. Rüdiger Kunow’s excellent essay questions the certainties of postcolonial theory and deals with more tangible disease ecologies in Jack London’s stories about Hawai’i, annexed by the United States in 1898 and far removed from Jewett’s Maine and the American subcontinent. While Hawai’i is exotic as a terrain, the “biopolitics of location” Kunow delineates amount to a regionally specific deconstruction of American exceptionalism. Colonialist notions of whiteness and virility are exposed to leprosy and its effects, biological factors embedded in a disease ecology that undermines American imperialism. What Kunow’s both ecological and political approach scrutinizes are the unsettling effects of an unfamiliar region’s otherness on the colonialist mindset that tries to subjugate and acculturate this region. The proneness of the indigenous Polynesian population to leprosy was registered by early missionaries and attributed to the sinful lifestyle of the natives. The leper colony of Kalaupapa became a quarantined heterotopic space within the Hawai’ian archipelago. Leprosy generated an inner division of the colonial space that affected the position of the colonizers as well as the colonized. The masculinity of the colonizers was challenged by a disease whose disfiguring consequences were on display among the infected islanders. In a sense, the lepers signaled a possible price of colonization.

London’s Hawai’ian stories, based on his sojourn on Hawai’i in 1907, thematize leprosy among the islanders and enmesh it in a dialectic of acknowledgment and entrapment. “Koolau the Leper” (1909) gives a voice to the leader of a group of native lepers who try to evade what they consider incarceration in the leper colony. While the lepers’ rebelliousness gestures in

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the direction of London’s anti-colonialism, his subsequent emphasis on their subhuman monstrosity and probable extinction by the mortal disease suggests an undercurrent of colonialist affirmation. London’s “The Sheriff of Koona” concentrates on the fate of a model American official, who contracts leprosy, conventionally considered a disease of the natives only. His fate as a volunteer for the leper colony and, later, an exile in Japan is juxtaposed with descriptions of Hawai’i as a natural paradise.

Kunow demonstrates that London’s Hawai’i is a highly ambivalent colonial space characterized by oscillations between the celebration of virility and natural beauty on the one hand and, on the other, by the dangerous virulence of leprosy, which affects colonizers and colonized alike. Due to the dialectic generated by the disease ecology of leprosy, the Hawai’ian terrain of a new Eden is a potential prison for Polynesians and a trap for American empire builders. Diseases such as leprosy also produce what Kunow calls “a form of emphatic regionalism”—a regionalism shot through with linkages to transnational capitalist and imperialist tendencies. While, in Jewett’s short story “The Foreigner,” otherness takes the form of both Caribbean and European cultural influences manifesting themselves in a migrant individual, it develops “a distinctive disease ecology” in London’s Hawai’ian stories, which “triangulates relations between indigenous people and settler colonists” (Kunow). In both cases the regional and the local serve as specific prisms which refract larger economic, political, and cultural interrelations.

Both Erik Redling’s essay on formal and linguistic aspects of Zora Neale Hurston’s attempt to reproduce African vernacular in her fiction and Nassim Balestrini’s discussion of microplays on climate change adopt unusual perspectives on the region and the environment. Both their perspectives are informed by an awareness of forms of presentation beyond the short story. Redling’s contribution explores dimensions of Hurston’s writing that transcend her positioning as a regionalist writer rooted in the all-black community of Eatonville, Florida. In a novel approach to the subject, Redling expands the narrow view of Hurston’s regionalism and interest in dialect and folklore by scrutinizing the innovative ways in which she makes use of scientific methods of verification and explanation encountered in her ethnological studies at Barnard College. In her first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), in the anthropological study Mules and Men (1935), and also in her later short story “Story in Harlem Slang” (1942), Hurston experiments with explanatory word lists and with glossaries, which she attaches to her literary texts and which even assume sufficient independence to stand alone in one case.

Redling’s independent and innovative approach to the innermost workings of Hurston’s literary production yields insights into the wide scope of the language-orientation of her regionalism, which ranges from Southern African American vernacular to its transformation in the language of Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance. Redling’s both structural and linguistic approach

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also reveals Hurston’s awareness of the problematic relationship between the experienced orality of African American speech and the visuality of her literary renditions of such speech patterns. From an unusual perspective Redling thus explores the specific problematic of regionalist fiction’s mimetic qualities, its claim to realist representation. Making use of concepts of decontextualization and recontextualization—central categories of Jack Goody’s 1977 study The Domestication of the Savage Mind—Redling scrutinizes the properties of the glossaries at the end of Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Mules and Men. These findings form the background to the examination of Hurston’s different use of such glossaries in “Story in Harlem Slang” in order to bring to the fore the complexities of what amounts to her attempt at reconciling anthropological and creative writing both in her fiction on rural Florida and urban Harlem. Appended lists of terms and idiomatic expressions develop into Hurston’s technique of paying tribute to the discrepancies between the oral and the visual perception of vernacular speech.

Making use of glossaries in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Mules and Men, Hurston probes into ways in which verbal items of local specificity can be decontextualized and how such discontinuity can be bridged and thereby recontextualized by the reader: “By recontextualizing the glossary with the main text and by interlinking the entries of the glossary with each other, Hurston seems to have exhausted her possibilities with this kind of glossary and develops a new approach to the literary text-glossary relationship in 1942” (Redling). Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang” represents this new approach, as it transforms Southern vernacular speech by converting it into a near-religious discourse, making use of biblical linguistic and structural patterns. It also radically changes and complicates the relationship between story and explanatory glossary. For “Story in Harlem Slang,” two glossaries exist, the manuscript version “Harlem Slanguage,” based on spontaneous perception and affective impact, and the alphabetically arranged “Glossary of Harlem Slang,” following rational ordering principles. The latter is attached to the published story: “Apparently Hurston explored the change from the unpublished glossary (manuscript) that ‘documented’ the workings of her mind, which she imagined as an associative chain of thought, to the published (printed) and alphabetically ordered glossary that enabled the general reader to look up and easily find the looked for entry” (Redling). This complex inversion of the respective functions of the story and its appendices reveals Hurston’s pronounced interest in the adequate rendition of African American speech in her literary work. Oscillating between stream of consciousness and photorealism, the story text is based on both emotive and positivist forms of discourse, represented by the different glossaries. These glossaries are in turn derived from a collection of actually experienced speech patterns and their attitudinal as well as semantic qualities. The glossaries and their interrelations form the basis of fiction, not the other way round. The short story form is thus employed as a container of both Hurston’s

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emotional concern for and anthropological research into the language of African Americans. Redling’s meticulous dissections of the addenda to Hurston’s fiction demonstrate that, unlike Alain Locke and other thinkers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston combines her desire to give African Americans a voice with the methods of an anthropological researcher.

Nassim Winnie Balestrini’s far-sighted contribution, which deals with advanced issues of creating community in microplays on anthropogenic climate change, expands the range of the other essays in more ways than one. While this special section is largely devoted to short fiction, Balestrini’s essay demonstrates interrelations between short fictions and short plays, different genres of short forms. It shows how this field of study can be fruitfully expanded and embedded in the larger context of what André Jolles presciently defined as simple forms. Balestrini’s essay discusses contemporary climate change plays commissioned by an activist movement called Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) between 2015 and 2019. Not exceeding five minutes performance time, these plays belong to a genre which is related to the short story by its very brevity. These plays also transcend regional as well as species boundaries, as they negotiate the global ecological consequences of anthropogenic climate change in many specific regions, locations, and communities as well as with regard to animal, human, and posthuman perspectives. As climate change is not perceivable as a sensory experience but only accessible to scientific procedures, microplays dealing with climate change have to find condensed scenic modes of representation, which foster the desired eco-activism. One theatrical attempt to transcend anthropocentrism consists in “developing non-human dramatic characters, such as future life forms, personified allegorical figures like Mother Earth, or animals” (Balestrini). In plays such as Lenora Champagne’s “Interview with a Polar Bear” (2015), Mindi Dickstein’s “Starving to Death in Midtown” (2015), Jessica Litwak’s “The Narcissism of Small Differences” (2018), and Elaine Ávila’s “The Rookery: A Play for Steller Sea Lions” (2019), cross-species communication is accompanied by self-reflection and alienation strategies in order to effect changes of perception in the respective audience.

Some of the plays use experimental modifications of “everyday communicative situations” (Balestrini) for their eco-critical messages—disembodied voices in Andrea Lepcio’s “Alone” (2015), conversations between humanoids and the audience in Chantal Bilodeau’s “Homo Sapiens” (2018), intersecting monologues in Brian Dykstra’s “Two Voices” (2019), or multiple voices in Bilodeau’s “It Starts with Me” (2019). As Balestrini fittingly summarizes, these dramatic techniques function as strategies in the service of eco-political activism. Insofar these plays can be considered latter-day agitprop drama:

The dialogs in these CCTA plays range from intimate conversations between twenty-first-century human earthlings via depictions of an ecological divide to vistas of our own extinction as perceived from the future. Furthermore, dialogs

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depict simultaneously evolving discourses which only intersect aurally during the experience of the play, and they break the fourth-wall illusion and elicit participatory mechanisms for the sake of encouraging a sense of responsibility that can spark activism.

In a topographical perspective these plays try to bridge the gap between the local and the global. In order to foster “’a scale-crossing environmental consciousness’” and “’grassroots ecocosmopolitanism’,” “multiscalar, simultaneously local and global, inherently intersectional thinking” (di Chiro qtd. in Balestrini) is indispensable. Thereby the distinctions between the specific ecological concerns of regional and local communities, and the planetary perspective, in which they are embedded, will vanish and “promote a new sense of community and belonging that acknowledges interdependence and multiscalar perception, and that situates the materially and sensorily not graspable predicament of climate change within the social—ranging from the inner sanctum of a private home to the shared planet as a whole” (Balestrini).

As the introduction to this special section by Ina Bergmann already indicates and as the contributions to it confirm, environmentalism, regionalism, and communitarianism are interrelated concepts. Environments, regions, and communities cannot be reduced to isolated opposites of mobility, globalization, and transnationalism but have to be accepted as sites of negotiation, which pay tribute to the limited circumference of the lives of each and all of us. Like the recent volume Simplify, simplify! Brevity, Plainness and Their Complications in American Literature and Culture (2019), edited by Isabell Klaiber et al., this special section also shows that the study of short forms cannot restrict itself to the consideration of short stories alone, but has to concern itself with microplays, poetry, commercial short texts and Twitter as well. Plenty of work lies ahead.

Jochen Achilles University of Würzburg, Germany

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WORKS CITED

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Achilles, Jochen. “Real Machines in Imaginary Gardens: Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden and Environmental Liminality in Flannery O’Connor’s ’A View of the Woods.’” Rural America. Eds. Antje Kley and Heike Paul. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. 207-25. Print.

Allison, Dorothy. Trash. 1995. New York: Penguin, 2018. Print.

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. Eds. Charles E. Modlin and Ray Lewis White. New York: Norton, 1996. Print.

Benesch, Klaus. “Cultural Immobility: Thoreau, Heidegger, and the Modern Politics of Place.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 57.3 (2012): 403-18. Print.

Benesch, Klaus. “Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age.” ZAA Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 64.1 (2016): 93-108. Print.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

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---. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U. S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.

---, and Leo Marx. “An Exchange on Thoreau.” The New York Review of Books. Dec. 2, 1999. Web. 30 April 2013.

Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. Print.

Cavell, Stanley. “Night and Day: Heidegger and Thoreau.” Revue Française d’Études Americaines 91 (Février 2002): 110-25. Print.

Chopin, Kate. “Désirée’s Baby.” 1893. The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin. Ed. and intr. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: Signet Classics, 1976. 173-78. Print.

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Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Print.

Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster Seattle, OE: Bay Press. 1983. 16-30. Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction.” Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 1-23. Print.

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Heidegger, Martin. “Bauen Wohnen Denken.” 1951. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 7. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. 145-64. Print.

---. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971. 141-160. Web. Accessed 13 Oct. 2020.

---. Der Feldweg. 1949. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006. Print.

---. “The Fieldpath.” Trans. Bent Mexia. Web. 13 Oct. 2020.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs. Novels and Stories. Ed. Michael Davitt Bell. New York: The Library of America, 1994. 371-487. Print.

Jolles, André. Simple Forms: Legend, Saga, Myth, Riddle, Saying, Case, Memorabile, Fairytale, Joke. 1930. New York: Verso, 2017. Print.

Kaplan, Amy. “Nation, Region, and Empire.” The Columbia History of the American Novel. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 240-66. Print.

Klaiber, Isabell, Oliver Scheiding, and Jan Stievermann, eds. Simplify, simplify! Brevity, Plainness and Their Complications in American Literature and Culture: Festschrift for Bernd Engler on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019. Print.

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Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford UP, 1968. Print.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us.” Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Seán Hand. 1963. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 231-34. Print.

Lösch, Klaus and Heike Paul. “Critical Regionalism: An Introduction.” Eds. Klaus Lösch, Heike Paul and Meike Zwingenberger. Critical Regionalism. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 1-10. Print.

Marx. Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 1964. 35th Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Muir, John. “My First Summer in the Sierra.” Nature Writings. Ed. William Cronon. New York: The Library of America, 1997. 147-309. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Print.

Pollock, Donald Ray. Knockemstiff. 2008. London: Vintage Books, 2009. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. 1854. Ed. and intr. Michael Meyer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Print.

“Thoreau, Henry David.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 5th Edition. Vol. I. New York: Norton, 1998. 1953-76. Print.

Tönnies, Ferdinand. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. 1887. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005. Print.

Yingling, Thomas. “Winesburg, Ohio and the End of Collective Experience.” New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio. Ed. John W. Crowley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 99-128. Print.

Zagarell, Sandra A. “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre.” Signs 13.3 (Spring 1988): 498-527. Print.

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Ce post-scriptum tente de faire deux choses : il délimite les tensions dialectiques élémentaires dans lesquelles s’inscrivent les débats sur l’environnement, la région et la communauté ; il décrit ensuite comment les contributions de cette section spéciale confirment et/ou élargissent cette controverse. La discussion sur l’environnementalisme est à la fois épistémologique et pragmatique, car il est possible d’intégrer l’espèce humaine dans l’écosphère par des gestes de renoncement. L’ancrage écocentriste de l’humanité dans la nature s’exprime par la mise en avant des déterminants régionaux et communautaires de la vie humaine. Alors que les arguments anthropocentristes concernant la domination prétendument inévitable de l’homo sapiens remettent en question la faisabilité de l’écocentrisme, les conceptions dialectiques de la région et de la communauté soulèvent des doutes quant à leur durabilité en tant que sanctuaires de modes de vie authentiques. La fiction régionaliste, les récits de communautés et les “micropièces” de théâtre contemporaines ne touchent pas seulement le débat de l’anthropocentrisme contre l’écocentrisme, ils sont également informés par les conflits contemporains du global et du local. De différentes manières, les contributions à cette section spéciale mettent en lumière des formes d’altérité qui imprègnent les communautés, les régions et les environnements et remettent ainsi en question leur singularité.

PART TWO

GENERAL SECTION

A “SECULAR” COVENANT: MOSAIC COVENANTAL THEOLOGY & THE JEWISH WORKING-CLASS

IN ABRAHAM CAHAN’S “A GHETTO WEDDING”

Although Abraham Cahan’s literary corpus abounds with meditations on Jewish-American marriage at the turn-of-the-twentieth century, marital happiness rarely exists in his fiction as capitalistic pressures and ethnic discrimination, even failures of personal character and forces of assimilation adversely impact Jewish life on New York’s Lower East Side. While scholars have studied Jewish marriage extensively in Cahan’s long and short fiction, “A Ghetto Wedding” and its theme of Jewish covenantal theology—Yahweh’s “marriage” to the nation of Israel and its faithful obedience to him—has escaped critical attention. To be precise, Cahan integrates the very sine qua non of Jewish covenantal thought into “A Ghetto Wedding”: the Mosaic covenant—Moses’ dedication of the ancient Israelites to Yahweh at Mount Sinai after their mass exodus out of Egyptian slavery. Implied in the term covenant itself, the Mosaic covenant functions as a spiritual and communal matrimonial tradition, uniting Yahweh and the Jews through ceremony, devotion, practice, and law. Well-versed in Jewish religious tradition himself, Cahan subtly uses the ghetto wedding of his protagonists, Nathan and Goldy, to tell a love story not merely about the literal marriage covenant between fin de siècle greenhorns living in New York City, but also the broken “covenants,” as it were, that existed between Gilded Age America and the Jewish working-class.

Most critics, interested only in sorting out the tale’s ambiguous ending, have ignored “A Ghetto Wedding” as a relatively unimportant story in Cahan’s work. In “The Lonely New Americans of Abraham Cahan,” Sanford Marovitz argued the story’s conclusion was “something brighter than unhappy,

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its optimism is but a tint of color amid varying shades of gray,” as Nathan and Goldy “prevail together” in a “Gentile world” (201). 1 Likewise, Ronald Sanders claims the “joy” of the couple’s “love” transcends the “squalor of their surroundings” (228), whereas Jules Chametzky echoes these critics by asserting that the couple finds “solace in each other’s love” (81). On the other hand, Susan Kress inverts such optimistic readings by re-reading Cahan’s story as tonally bleak and anti-romantic, evidenced by the tale’s stark realist language of “emptiness, death, and darkness” (32-33). Nonetheless, this preoccupation with Cahan’s either optimistic or pessimistic ending in “A Ghetto Wedding” has consequently overlooked the story’s anti-capitalist and anti-religious arguments that quite unexpectedly materialize in, and through, Cahan’s invocations of Jewish covenantal theology.

That said, “A Ghetto Wedding” also ought to be read within the context of Mosaic covenantal thought. Cahan’s story weds a young Jewish couple, functionally, but a Mosaic covenant marriage unites Nathan and Goldy to their religious and cultural past, as repeated allusions to the Mosaic covenant and the Biblical exodus story frame Nathan and Goldy’s pursuit of an expensive, respectable middle-class wedding in order to escape their poverty under late nineteenth-century U.S. capitalism. Yet, while Yahweh delivered the Israelites from Egyptian slavery under the Mosaic covenant, no God, ironically, comes to rescue the lovers from the slavery of financial ruin in America; in Cahan’s words, the “Uppermost” (229) neither bestows material blessings, nor monetary funds on the couple, and therefore appears at times not to exist at all. Nathan and Goldy’s naïve quest for the lavish materialism and financial prosperity promised by capitalism, and the lovers’ belief in Yahweh’s promise to vouchsafe provisions to them in the “Promised Land” (14) 2 of American opportunity and prosperity work in tandem as Cahan’s interwoven critiques throughout “A Ghetto Wedding”: U.S. capitalism’s ideological covenant with Nathan and Goldy (and Jewish immigrants, more broadly) neither secures for them economic freedom nor social liberation, and thus, Yahweh’s spiritual covenant with the couple also fails to guarantee them providential deliverance from dire poverty. By the story’s end, Nathan and Goldy’s tragic awareness of these broken covenants evinces Cahan’s pragmatic socialism and atheistic philosophy as the panacea to the Jews’ working-class plight in the 1890s U.S. I wish to argue “A Ghetto Wedding” understood in this way, and as the last

1. Marovitz’s reiterates this argument in his book Abraham Cahan by claiming the couple’s “faith in love” overcomes their poverty as the story ends on a somewhat “hopeful note,” even as an “increasingly somber tone” and “sense of disillusionment” pervade the story’s denoue-ment (95). 2. Cahan, interestingly enough, uses “Promised Land” ironically in Yekl—as elsewhere in his writings (e.g. The Rise of David Levinsky)—to describe America’s failed promises in contra-distinction to the term’s more positive and hopeful connotations in Jewish belief and tradi-tion. See Cahan, Yekl 14.

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tale within Cahan’s collection The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, ultimately suggests that Nathan and Goldy’s marriage signifies a new secular covenant for Jewish-Americans, one neither predicated on Yahweh’s providence and blessings, nor capitalism’s prosperity and greed, but on Cahan’s atheistic-socialist credo, as the surest means for the Jews to emancipate themselves from the boom-and-bust cycles of the Gilded Age.

This is surely important to attentive readers of Cahan’s marriage fiction whose scholarship has all-to-often lacked the theological depth to appreciate the more religious connotations of his many fictional Jewish marriages. More crucially, to acknowledge an avowedly secular writer like Cahan borrowing from, and incorporating, Jewish religion into his fiction and politics builds off the recent scholarly push to understand the many religious and secular entanglements in Cahan’s corpus. I follow those critics, who, like Sharon Oster, refuse to pit the religious against the secular in Cahan’s fiction or disown theological concepts and the religious tradition that radically underpin his secular worldview and thematic excurses. My own reading of Jewish marriage in “A Ghetto Wedding” broadly speaks to the unexpected ways Cahan’s marriage fiction advocates for a secularism that paradoxically depends upon, and subtly desiderates Orthodox Judaism itself.

“A Ghetto Wedding” commences not with joyous wedding preparations, but with the “idleness,” “distress,” and “groaning” of Jewish peddlers (224). In “Grand Street,” businesses emit dazzling lights and display flashy commodities as the “Passover” season approaches; however, under the “kindly good will” of Grand Street’s “glare,” nothing is quite so grand for the impoverished peddlers (224). Stricken with the financial Panic of 1893—one of the major U.S. recessions of the postbellum era—the fate of the Jews’ in the story is grim: men and women shop with “hungry eye[s]” in an “errand of self-torture,” consumerism creates “pangs” and “empty purse[s],” and many live in “desperation of imminent ruin” (224). Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. had periodically faced economic downturns, but the Panic of 1893 was undoubtedly the hardest felt in post-Civil War America. Not surprisingly, Cahan’s 1890s fiction is unmistakably inflected by this catastrophic event, especially in the lives of the poor Jewish workers who populate the urban wasteland of “A Ghetto Wedding.” Cahan’s Jews, in other words, inhabit a “tale of [economic] woe,” but this harrowing story also noxiously affects one of the Jewish community’s most sacred institutions: marriage (224).

The scene quickly shifts to Nathan and Goldy, a poor Jewish couple on the verge of matrimony. Nathan’s street peddling and Goldy’s “knee breeches” earn them a small income as both struggle to find employment (225). Nevertheless, it is the couple’s wedding investments that exacerbate their poverty: Goldy’s name confirms her materialistic personality: she desires an expensive, “respectable” middle-class wedding, whereas Nathan asks for only a “modest . . . celebration” (225). However, “Goldy . . . summarily and

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indignantly overruled him” (225), exposing the strained tensions of their relationship under working-class conditions: Nathan foresees the hubris in Goldy’s avarice, even as he acquiesces to it. And yet, Goldy’s fervent desire for an expensive wedding (with Nathan’s reluctance) becomes inextricably tied to other types of marriage covenants in Jewish religious tradition. Cahan’s allusive shifts from literal marriage to theological marriage is a recurrent pattern in the story as Mosaic tropes and exodic diction from the Old Testament accompany Nathan and Goldy’s marriage plot. Yet, to understand Cahan’s use of Jewish covenantal marriage, one must examine its theological resonances and historical roots in the Judaism that Cahan had been steeped in throughout his Orthodox upbringing, formal education, and personal experience. 3

In other words, what Cahan invokes in “A Ghetto Wedding” is the language of Mosaic covenantal theology. In Jewish tradition, the marriage covenant signified a relationship rooted in loving commitment, mutual obligation, and sustained durability, something its etymological roots (in Hebrew, “bĕrit”) also connotes—a marital union with fortified strength. 4 Jewish marriages, like Nathan and Goldy’s, thus become allegorically representative and spiritually metonymic of God’s binding covenant with the Israelites. The Israelites’ exodus testified to Yahweh’s providential hand in blessing the Jews and resulted in Moses’ promise to God that Israel would faithfully obey and serve him, something which ultimately climaxed in the covenantal marriage that wedded God and the Jewish people together at Mount Sinai. David Novak’s chapter in Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism, “Jewish Marriage: Nature, Covenant, and Contract,” helps to capture this intimately-knit relationship between the Mosaic covenant and Jewish marriage in the Mount Sinai meeting: “Jewish marriage . . . is what has been prescribed for Jews specifically after their acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai. In rabbinic teaching, this is the covenantal event that separated the Jews from the rest of the peoples of the world and gave them their unique identity” (62). Michael Kaufman’s Love,

3. Cahan was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in Belarus before moving to America in the early 1880s. As Jules Chametzky writes on Cahan’s early life, “Cahan was born . . . in a small village near Vilna, a . . . renowned seat of Jewish learning—Napoleon had dubbed it ‘the Jeru-salem of Lithuania’ . . . He was educated in various Hebrew schools” which largely consisted of intense “study, reading, and writing” on Jewish scripture, history, law, and culture (1-2). His grandfather was a rabbi, his father was a teacher of the Hebrew language, and Cahan himself initially trained to be a rabbi before gradually turning away from Judaism. 4. Bernhard Anderson lucidly suggests that “bĕrit” means, quite literally, to “bound” and “fet-ter” in a binding relationship (138-39). Jewish scholar David Novak in Covenantal Rights places “covenant” at the heart of Jewish political thought, and his extended discussion on the political nature of covenantal theology emphasizes God’s “direct covenant” with the Jews as the “primary concern” in the Tanakh (84). As Daniel Elazar broadly defines it in Covenant & Polity in Biblical Israel, “[Jewish] covenant involves a coming together (con-gregation) of basically equal humans who consent with one another through a morally binding pact with a transcendent power” (1).

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Marriage, and Family in Jewish Law and Tradition further observes that this Sinai event was also a “spiritual marriage” between God and Israel where the “Ten Commandments and the Torah . . . [were] allegorically identified as the ketubah, the betrothal contract, for the kidushin [betrothal] between God and Israel at Sinai” (124-25). Rabbinical scholar Basil Herring even goes so far as to say in The Jewish Imagination: Discourses on Contemporary Jewish Life that this Mosaic dimension of human marriage in Judaism is the hallmark of the Jewish faith because “it is precisely . . . [human] marriage that describes our relationship with God” in the “meeting at Sinai, when . . . the marriage [shidduch], between God and the Jewish people was consummated” (129). Hence, Cahan’s fusion of the Mosaic covenant with his own marriage plot set within a Jewish slum racked by financial depression and labor exploitation—another kind of slavery—suggests his story “A Ghetto Wedding” was far more than just a realist tale about a Jewish ghetto marriage. Theology is clearly at work here.

But, how (and why) does Cahan fuse this Mosaic covenant to Nathan and Goldy’s wedding? Nathan’s peddling of “Passover dishes” during the Jewish holiday season is a telling first clue (225). The story also begins in February and leads up to the couple’s wedding on an “early date in April”—a nod that the Passover season is at hand (230). Even the story’s seven-day temporal structure mirrors the Passover’s seven-day celebration (231-34). Interestingly enough, Cahan sets up Nathan and Goldy’s wedding ceremony to precisely coincide with the Passover itself—the celebration of the Jewish exodus from slavery and into the Promised Land, an event indissolubly linked to the story of the Mosaic covenant between Yahweh and the Israelites. Here, Cahan’s parallelism elicits the story’s crux and its theological significance: Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side suffer under working-class “slavery,” akin to the ancient Israelites’ bondage in Egypt, but unlike their ancestors’ flight into freedom, Jewish workers are ironically oppressed within a purportedly modern-day U.S. Promised Land that, in fact, makes them victims of capitalism’s volatile markets and brute forces. During the late nineteenth century, many Jewish immigrants had come to imagine America as what Hasia R. Diner aptly calls “A New Promised Land,” where the “promise of a better life”—in the covenantal tradition of Moses—offered them a “place where they could make a living—and a place where they could live” (viii, 42). 5 However, in the Panic of 1893, Jewish immigrants often found the U.S. to be anything but a land of milk and honey. As Douglas Steeples and David Whitten explain in Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893:

5. Eli Lederhendler also discusses representations of the U.S. as a new “promised land,” and its regnant status in the Jewish imagination as Yahweh’s “chosen” nation and “promised land” (183-87, 159). Moreover, as Moses Rischin has shown, it was New York City, more than other major cities, that symbolized America’s prosperous opportunities for Jewish immigrants.

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The business contraction of the 1890s washed over American life like a swirling tsunami over an exposed coastline. Everything that was exposed and vulnerable felt its effects. The pattern and pace of life changed. Problems such as unemployment, poverty, vagrancy, and labor relations swept to unprecedented urgency. Social tensions, including nativistic and jingoistic impulses. . . . Depression buffeted even the most intimate aspects of life. Joblessness, fear of layoffs, reduced or uncertain income, empty dinner pails, and poor economic prospects forced many young couples to prolong courtship and defer marriage. (84)

Cahan’s “A Ghetto Wedding” mirrors these social and economic conditions as “chaos,” “groaning,” “woe,” “empty purse[s],” “self-torture,” “begging alms,” “hopeless dearth,” “peddlers,” and the “mournful” chants of a “funeral” all typify Jewish working-class life in 1890s America, including Nathan and Goldy’s struggles to establish financial security as a poor married couple. With Passover near, Cahan starkly limns the broken covenant of capitalism with the Jewish working-class who tragically believes in its promises at a time of year celebrated for the consummated covenant between Moses and God, thereby dramatizing Jewish liberation as an unfulfilled promise in contemporary American life at nearly every turn (224-25).

Nathan and Goldy, however, fail to see how their gross materialism, acquisitiveness (230), and the “economy of married life” (226) are illusory pursuits. Their engagement from “two years before” is prolonged “month to month” as “[h]ard times set in.” Nevertheless, both work harder and make “heroic economies,” “pinch[ing]” and “scrimp[ing]” (226). Even the couple’s scheme to invest all their savings in the wedding in hopes of receiving luxurious gifts and monies proves to be their hamartia, and more importantly, eventually undermines their faith in the capitalist system altogether. Goldy’s humorous jest when she finds Nathan selling Passover dishes, for instance, makes this point clear as Cahan ventriloquizes his socialism through her anti-capitalist joke, “‘Where is the disgrace? As if you were the only peddler in America! I wish you were. Wouldn’t you make heaps of money then!’” (227). By the 1890s, Cahan’s nearly twenty years in the U.S. socialist movement, and William Dean Howells’ praise that he was the rising “New Star of Realism,” captured Cahan’s anti-capitalist spirit in his realist fiction of the 1890s—what Cahan called “socialist realism”—privileging nitty-gritty scenes of Jewish poverty, oppression, and exclusion over the local color quaintness or romanticized images of urban Jewish life bourgeois readers both desired and consumed (Kirk and Kirk 29). Cahan saw his socialist realism as the true aesthetics for sorting out the “relationship between literature and social problems,” as he wrote in The Education of Abraham Cahan, an artistic philosophy that oriented his fiction away from local color distinctives and instead toward the material and economic tensions of the Gilded Age (404-05). As Cahan once claimed, “[T]he rottenness of capitalistic society inevitably lends color to every

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work of realistic fiction” (Kirk and Kirk 29). “A Ghetto Wedding” was the result of this realist style and socialist politics put into practice.

However, Cahan’s socialist-realist critique of Nathan and Goldy’s covenantal trust in capitalism also extends seamlessly to include the couple’s naïve faith in God’s providence to rescue them from poverty. Goldy insists the wedding was divinely “predestined” (226) and “foreordained” (230), invoking divine blessings with hubris, “‘May God give us a lump of good luck as big as the wedding present each of [the guests] is sure to send us!’” (229). At other times, Goldy’s confidence is overly presumptuous, “‘It [the wedding] will all come right, depend upon it. . . . You [Nathan] and I are orphans, and you know the Uppermost does not forsake a bride and bridegroom who have nobody to take care of them’” (229). Nathan and Goldy’s desire for the promises of New World capitalism match their longings for the Old World’s providential faithfulness of Yahweh. In fact, Goldy’s belief the “Uppermost” does not forsake “orphans” is one of the major protections Yahweh vows to the Jews in the law of the Mosaic covenant. “You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry” (Exodus 22:22-24). Nathan and Goldy’s steadfast hope that Yahweh will also “heed their cry” in a land of capitalist “abuse” fuels their fatal descent into economic ruin.

Nathan and Goldy’s foolish investments yield negligible returns. Goldy purchases over a “hundred invitations . . . luxurious . . . black and gold,” the couple pays a “month’s rent in advance for three [tenement] rooms,” Goldy gives “up her work a week in advance of the day set for the great event” to receive wedding presents, and other necessary funds dry up (230-31). Once again, Cahan’s story invokes the Mosaic covenant by paralleling Goldy’s week spent waiting for the arrival of her guests’ wedding presents during the Passover’s seven-day celebration (231-34). However, Goldy’s endless “waiting, waiting, waiting” proves fruitless and leads her into “fear,” “insanity,” and “despair” (232). Furthermore, Cahan’s recurrent phrases evoking both God’s absence and the room’s material emptiness—the “vacuity of the rooms,” “emptiness of the rooms,” and “emptiness of the apartments”—stress the irony of the couple’s godforsakenness as opposed to the Passover season’s celebration of Yahweh’s deliverance and gift of material abundance. By the seventh day, Goldy’s gratitude to Yahweh, “thank God,” rings out as only a hollow cry since, for Cahan, the “God” she thanks has neither delivered blessings nor is anywhere to be found (233).

At this point, “A Ghetto Wedding” transitions from a story about faith in Yahweh’s provision to atheism. Early in life, Cahan’s secular studies turned him into an apostate: “Clearly, there were no mysteries! There was no God!” (Lipsky 17-18). To be sure, Cahan always respected Jewish religious tradition, social community, and ethical practice throughout his life; however, he insisted that he was “absolutely not religious,” but a “free-thinker in the fullest sense of the word, as are most radical people [i.e. socialists]” (Lipsky 175). This deep-

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seated atheism, in conjunction with his later socialist politics, would come to animate so much of his realist fiction in the 1880s and 1890s (and beyond). 6 “A Ghetto Wedding” is no exception. Religious doubt waxes and trust in Yahweh’s covenant wanes as the story progresses. Cahan’s story culminates in a wedding of Jewish lovers on the night of the Passover celebration, but here the scene only resembles a “funeral” where both the covenantal promises of U.S. capitalism and naïve faith come to die (234).

Cahan’s morbid diction haunts the scene’s funerary aesthetics. The couple’s “respectable” wedding is abruptly dashed when “only a score of people” attend, musicians’ instruments “shriek[-]” in “pain” and “torture[-]” under “malicious” and “fiendish[-]” gaslights, the rabbi’s “gaunt” and “melancholy face” ominously augurs death, and the guests dance isolated and “afraid” (233-34). The wedding’s uncanny mood is no mystery, however. “[T]he invited friends were kept away by lack of employment: some having their presentable clothes in the pawn shop; others avoiding the expense of a wedding present, or simply being too cruelly borne down by their [economic] cares.” There is a “contagion of misery” and the musicians and rabbi also suffer (233-34). Cahan exposes the havoc capitalism inflicts on the Jewish ghetto, but also the way it deludes the starry-eyed lovers to dream of a “respectable” wedding that only contributes to their fiscal precarity and abject misery. Goldy’s realization of this fact transforms her face into something as “pale as death,” “as if . . . an executioner [had] come to lead her to the scaffold” (234). Nathan and Goldy’s plan to escape poverty also becomes ruinous as the guests’ meager wedding gifts do not nearly begin to compensate for the couple’s risky investments. Unlike the Mosaic covenant, Nathan and Goldy’s hope for liberation in a new promised land reveals itself to be nothing more than working-class bondage as Yahweh’s failure to uphold his end of the covenant leads the couple to doubt God’s faithfulness, and even his very existence.

The couple’s wedding on the last day of Passover only accentuates their disastrous error in trusting in the God of Israel. The language of tragedy pervades the nuptial ceremony as Cahan uses the sung verses of a “poverty-stricken” rabbi to predict Nathan and Goldy’s peripeteia:

Tonight, bride, thou dost stand before the Uppermost.Pray to him to bless thy union,To let thee and thy mate live a hundred and twenty peaceful years,To give you your daily bread,To keep hunger from your door. (234-35)

6. Cahan’s fiction is suffused with Jewish immigrants who struggle to hold onto (or lose) their Jewish faith in the United States. To name a few, Yekl’s Jake, The Imported Bridegroom’s Shaya, and The Rise of David Levinsky’s David Levinsky are all prominent characters in Ca-han’s fiction who might be said to undergo “secularization,” even as they manifest new forms of “religious” sensibilities, identifications, and practices.

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The rabbi’s song is unwittingly satirical within the context of the “Uppermost[’s]” inability to rescue the couple from their economic plight (“bless thy union”), physical starvation (“daily bread”), and spiritual ill-health (“peaceful years”). Overwhelmed by the rabbi’s words, Goldy faints provoking one guest to call the rabbi, quite tellingly, a “Murderer” (235). Goldy’s death-like swoon, at this climatic juncture in the plot, is a type of death to the illusions of capitalist ideology and Jewish religion. Nathan’s ceremonial words to Goldy, “‘Be thou dedicated to me by this ring, according to the laws of Moses and Israel’” (236), only serve to emphasize the radical chasm that exists betwixt the Mosaic covenant’s life-giving promises, and the couple’s now defunct hopes.

Nathan and Goldly are soon threatened with existential despair. The dining hall’s “vacant benches” and “untouched covers” exaggerate the “emptiness of the room, in which the sorry handful of a company lost themselves” (236), and long rows of “plates, spoons, forks, knives” weigh down Goldy’s spirit with “cold . . . pompous array” (236). Guests are also embarrassed by the “ruthless sparkle of the unused plates,” while “silence” rests “over the room” as the “jingle” of “knives and forks” makes the wedding feast awkward and uncomfortable (237). Goldy’s devastation is palpable, “‘I am not the Goldy I used to be . . . [and] we have spent every cent we had on this grand wedding, and now we are left without money for furniture, and there are no guests to send us any, and the supper will be thrown out, and everything is lost, and I am to blame for it all!’” (236-37). Goldy’s moral awakening is so unbearable that she “trie[s] to imagine herself dead,” although Nathan reassures her: “‘Don’t take it to heart. There is a God in heaven’” (237). This time, Goldy does not respond to Nathan’s pious words with more faith for a “tearful look was all the response she could make” (237). Goldy’s orthodox belief slips into speechless unbelief as she wrestles with how to reconcile the couple’s suffering with God’s goodness. Similarly, whereas Nathan’s initial faith in Yahweh was dubious at best, his later remark to Goldy, “There is a God in heaven,” appears not so much as a strongly-held conviction as it does a desperate plea to restore spiritual coherency to an incoherent world. In the end, Nathan and Goldy do experience the blessings of loving relationships, human community, and moral goodness; however, whatever spiritual ties the couple have established with Orthodox Judaism quickly devolve into doubt and disbelief (237-38).

In the story’s denouement, Nathan and Goldy’s exit signifies the extent to which their faith has all but vanished. The American promised land, in other words, becomes a “deserted” and “haunting” wasteland as boom-and-bust economics prevail in God’s absence (239). Nathan and Goldy are left penniless in a turn-of-the-century urban nightmare as even their wedding guests are constrained by capitalist pressures, “hurry[-ing] to get away to [their] own world, and to abandon the young couple to their fate” (238). Nathan, again, half-heartedly says to Goldy, “‘There is a God in heaven: he will not forsake us,’” insisting they as newlyweds go home in a “respectable” carriage (238).

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Still, Goldy neither believes in Nathan’s meaningless cliché over God’s faithfulness, nor heeds the pursuit of material goods and capital gain, but with Nathan, humbly walks home instead. Cahan’s diction, however, is foreboding as a “sense of loneliness,” “dismal silence,” and “haunting emptiness” pervade the couple’s walk home through the “gloomiest,” “roughest,” and most “impoverished” streets, where they encounter Gentile ruffians who ostracize them with anti-Semitic derision (239). Unlike Moses and the Israelites who wander in the desert wilderness for forty years before reaching the Promised Land, Nathan and Goldy aimlessly wander in an industrial wilderness ravaged by capitalist oppression and ethnic discrimination, exiled without hope for material liberation and spiritual deliverance.

Cahan’s “A Ghetto Wedding,” however, ends not in purposelessness or despair, often said to be the concluding theme of, for example, The Rise of David Levinsky, one that imbues so much of Cahan’s other fiction, as Richard Pressman has observed (2). The story’s ending identifies economic restoration for Jewish-Americans in Cahan’s atheistic philosophy and socialist ideology of the 1890s. Essential to the story’s resolution is Nathan and Goldy’s newfound dependence on one another. As an existential “emptiness” plagues the couple, Goldy “lean[s] upon [Nathan’s] arm, and he tenderly presse[s] her to his side”; and again, as they walk through New York’s ghetto streets, “she clung closer to her escort” and “nestled close to his side and held him fast” feeling a “stream of happiness uniting them . . . and they were filled with a blissful sense of oneness” (239-40). Nonetheless, this marital bliss harbors a cosmic import as the couple’s “relentless void” (240)—their loss of faith, in God and in American prosperity—“abruptly turn[s] to a beatific sense of their own seclusion, of there being only themselves in the universe, to live and to delight in each other” (240). With no God in the “universe” to rescue them, it is their anthropocentric turn away from the God of Israel—only “themselves” alone “to live and delight in”—that yields Cahan’s socialist vision for Jewish liberation.

In this way, “A Ghetto Wedding” does not merely trace the radical transformation of Nathan and Goldy’s worldview, but registers the protagonists as symbolic embodiments of Cahan’s atheistic-socialist credo—a secular covenant. As Nathan and Goldy walk home, the narrator observes that “[a] gentle breeze ran past and ahead of them, proclaiming the bride and the bridegroom. An old tree whispered overhead its tender felicitations” (240). Harkening back to Exodus 3:1-10, Cahan recalls for readers Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush, the incident in which Moses was first instructed to lead the Jews out of slavery. This marked the inception of the Mosaic covenant as God promised “to rescue them [the Jews] from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up . . . into a good and spacious land, a [promised] land flowing with milk and honey.” Cahan’s “old tree,” then, becomes the ghetto’s new burning bush as an otherworldly voice—the writer’s (not God’s)—blesses this new “bride” and “bridegroom” with a covenantal

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“breeze” of “tender felicitations” to usher in a modern exodus from the bonds of laissez faire capitalism and religious orthodoxy into the future of an American Canaan (240).

Still, Cahan’s “A Ghetto Wedding” does not call on revolutionary violence or political action to expedite economic change in the U.S.; rather, Cahan invites readers to reconsider, as Nathan and Goldy do, the covenant relationships that enslave Jews to working-class poverty. Cahan’s protagonists still face a hostile future as they “dive[-] into the denser gloom of a sidestreet” at the end of the story (240). Critics have long struggled with the question of how to read this ambiguous ending, either seeing optimism in the couple’s romantic love triumphing over materialism or finding pessimism in the story’s poverty-stricken world. However, Cahan’s use of Jewish covenantal theology, as this essay has argued, speaks less to the ending as something to be understood primarily in optimistic or pessimistic terms, and more to how his kind of socialist convictions and atheistic beliefs in the 1890s impacted his realist fiction. As biographer Seth Lipsky writes in The Rise of Abraham Cahan, “Cahan was becoming convinced [in the 1890s] that a realistic, pragmatic approach to implementing social change, and not the uncompromising, doctrinaire views of the [socialist] movement’s orthodox wing, was the best way to achieve socialist goals” (82). “A Ghetto Wedding” reflects this incremental, socialist pragmatism as it is figured in Nathan and Goldy’s “blissful sense of oneness” towards the promise of a new Jewish future despite its bleak prospects in the present. This reading of “A Ghetto Wedding” undoes the false optimistic/pessimistic split in prior scholarship by reimagining Nathan and Goldy as the reification of both the optimism in Cahan’s socialist-atheistic vision and the pessimistic realities of economic depression and social exclusion that continue to plague working-class Jews. Just as tribulations followed Moses and his people in the wilderness, Cahan knew a secular covenant would also entail many long years of arduous suffering and exilic wandering for the Jews in the urban wilderness before America’s promised land could be reached.

More importantly, anything “secular” in the secular covenant of Nathan and Goldy’s marriage is, paradoxically, rooted firmly in Jewish religion itself. Again, Lipsky is instructive here: “[T]he most remarkable fact of Abraham’s life was that, for all his worldly and political success, for all his freethinking and socialist idealism, he was never able to escape thinking of himself as a young yeshiva [student?] . . . who prized, above all else, the wonder of Jewish life” (25-26). So too, Cahan’s atheistic shift away from Jewish “religion in the name of socialism” to “mount his last big fight against those who would abandon the Jewish religion [and culture] in the name of harmony and integration” testifies to his complicated and ambivalent relationships with both Judaism and secularism (22-23). Cahan’s realist fiction was no different, valuing “collective Jewish memory [and history] in the face of displacement, secular progress, and laissez-faire capitalism,” rewriting the “Hebraic myth of

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the [Jewish] past into a figure of messianic hope,” and imagining a “forward-looking” world-to-come embedded within Jewish eschatology (Oster 42, 10, 26). 7 Put differently, “A Ghetto Wedding” converts Nathan and Goldy into secular messiahs of pragmatic socialism, celebrates Jewish religious life despite God’s non-existence, transposes Judaism’s belief in the end-times into an anti-capitalist teleology of U.S. history, and most importantly, reimagines Mosaic covenantal theology as the very mechanism that makes Cahan’s “secular” covenant even possible in the modern world. God, of course, was an illusory fiction for Cahan, but Judaism was a religious past and cultural force he insisted was instrumental to his contemporary realist fiction and socialist politics. In a scribbled note to himself, he wrote “[s]ocialism occupies the place of religion,” a claim that not only registered U.S. socialism’s substantial growth in the 1890s, but also spoke to Cahan’s belief in freethinking socialism over revealed faith, even as he himself repeatedly returned to Jewish religious belief and tradition as an enriching wellspring for working-class liberation in America and re-enchanting the world after the death of God (Lipsky 81-82).

Cahan’s secular covenant, then, is “secular” only in Nathan and Goldy’s rejection of God’s providence (and existence), even as religious tradition and community ground their ethnic identity in an economically hostile and anti-Semitic U.S., a “secular” covenant indebted to the Mosaic covenant theology that informs and shapes his ideological vision of a socialist future in “A Ghetto Wedding.” In 1898, Cahan published “A Ghetto Wedding” in The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, a short story collection in which Jewish marriage plays a central thematic role. In “The Imported Bridegroom,” a Talmudist relinquishes his Jewish faith and marries a recently secularized wife. “A Providential Match” tells of a betrothed woman who sails to meet her divinely predestined husband in America, even as other Jewish characters live shackled to financial destitution. “A Sweatshop Romance” looks at the loss of a young man’s sweetheart in a city workshop that exploits Jewish laborers. “Circumstances” even shows how the strenuous conditions of working-class poverty lead to marital disintegration. “A Ghetto Wedding,” as

7. Oster, most broadly, is critiquing scholarship that has framed U.S. literary realism as a “secular” cultural formation, one variation on the long-held, but now seriously questioned “secularization thesis.” This thesis, in short, proposed that as the West modernized, it would inexorably secularize as Enlightenment science, technological modernization, and the frag-mentation of social life took over traditional religion and spiritual experience from public life and culture. This has been challenged by a number of scholars—Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Tracy Fesseden, and Vincent Pecora, to name a few—under the banner of postsecular criti-cism. Oster’s work helps to put Cahan’s life and letters in this (necessary) postsecular light, showing how even atheistic writers, like him, routinely upset this secular label by revisiting religious belief, theological aesthetics, communal ritual, and spiritual practices, amongst others, to articulate their literary craft and political projects. And so, my reading of Cahan’s “A Ghetto Wedding” follows Oster implicitly in this postsecular vein.

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the last story in this collection, thus thematically unites each of the previous tales’ concerns with Jewish marriage and its capitalist discontents in late nineteenth-century America, as well as locates hope in Nathan and Goldy’s secular covenant which, as I would like to suggest, indicates one important way to re-interrogate Cahan’s marriage fiction with Jewish covenantal theology in mind.

Of course, to say that Cahan’s marriage fiction has been influenced by his Jewish milieu is hardly news. But, this is not my claim. What is new however is that “A Ghetto Wedding” attempts to imagine a secular substitute to counter the forces of capitalist domination and to fulfill a subtle longing for a non-religious worldview somehow powerful enough to mobilize the kind of communal relations, spiritual resources, and moral-ethical force Cahan recognized Jewish religion had once provided. The story reveals Cahan’s incessant desire to return to, to use Lipsky’s phrase again, the “wonder of Jewish life” and the enchantment of Judaism—in this case, Yahweh’s divine power and goodness to miraculously deliver Nathan and Goldy from working-class oppression. It insists on the hope for a secular proxy that, in the wake of God’s death, would ultimately save the Jewish working-class from the godless world it now inhabits and revive the existential “wonder” and spiritual “enchantment” Cahan had always recognized in his now bygone Jewish faith. Cahan’s marriage fiction rarely, if ever, divorces the sacred from the secular. It is “A Ghetto Wedding” that tells this story: wedded to the ghetto poverty of fin-de-siecle capitalism and God’s financial promises in a modern-day Canaan, only a new “secular” marriage covenant—pragmatic and realistic, socialist in spirit and atheist in principle—can re-wed Jewish immigrants to their coming liberation. This, according to Cahan, is the only truly “enchanted world”—neither of God, nor of capital—beyond the ghetto (240).

Ryan David Furlong University of Iowa

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WORKS CITED

Anderson, Bernhard. The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

Cahan, Abraham. The Education of Abraham Cahan. Trans. Leon Stein, et. al. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969. Print.

——. Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto. New York: Dover, 1970. Print.

Chametzky, Jules. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1977. Print.

Diner, Hasia R. A New Promised Land: A History of Jews in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Elazar, Daniel. Covenant & Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations & Jewish Expressions. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995. Print.

Herring, Basil. The Jewish Imagination: Discourses on Contemporary Jewish Life. Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav Publishing House Inc., 1989. Print.

Kaplan, Amy. Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018. Print.

Kaufman, Michael. Love, Marriage, and Family in Jewish Law and Tradition. Upper Saddle River: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1992. Print.

Kirk, Rudolph, and Clara M. Kirk. “Abraham Cahan and William Dean Howells: The Story of a Friendship.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52.1 (1962): 27-57. Print.

Kress, Susan. “Women and Marriage in Abraham Cahan’s Fiction.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 26-39. Print.

Lederhendler, Eli. American Jewry: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. Print.

Lipsky, Seth. The Rise of Abraham Cahan. New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2013. Print.

Marovitz, Sanford. “The Lonely New Americans of Abraham Cahan.” American Quarterly 20.2 (1968): 196-210. Print.

Marovitz, Sanford E. Abraham Cahan. New York: Twayne, 1996. Print.

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Novak, David. Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.

---. “Jewish Marriage: Nature, Covenant, and Contract.” Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism. Eds. Michael J. Broyde and Michael Ausubel. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. Print.

Oster, Sharon. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2018. Print.

Pressman, Richard. “Abraham Cahan, Capitalist: David Levinsky, Socialist.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 12 (1993): 2-18. Print.

Rischin, Moses. The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. Print.

Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Print.

Steeples, Douglas W., and David O. Whitten. Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998. Print.

L’œuvre d’Abraham Cahan regorge de mariages se déroulant au tournant du xxe siècle. Mais, alors que les spécialistes ont étudié en profondeur le mariage juif, “Un Mariage dans le ghetto” et sa théologie de l’alliance juive (le “mariage” de Yahvé à la nation d’Israël et leur obéissance à son égard, mais plus précisément l’alliance mosaïque) ont échappé à la critique. Cette nouvelle épouse littéralement un jeune couple juif, mais un mariage de l’alliance mosaïque unit Nathan et Goldy à leur passé religieux et culturel, encadrant leur désir d’un mariage coûteux sous le capitalisme fin de siècle. Cependant, alors que Yahvé a délivré les Israélites de l’esclavage égyptien dans le cadre de l’alliance mosaïque, aucun Dieu ne se manifeste (ou n’existe) pour sauver les amoureux de l’esclavage lié à la ruine financière en Amérique. Comme le montre cette contribution, l’alliance idéologique de Nathan et Goldy (et plus largement celle des immigrants juifs) avec le capitalisme américain ne garantit ni la liberté économique ni la libération sociale, tandis que l’alliance spirituelle de Yahvé ne les délivre pas, providentiellement, des “boums et des crises” de l’âge d’or. Le destin tragique de Nathan et Goldy renvoie donc au socialisme pragmatique et à la philosophie athée de Cahan qui serait la panacée au problème de la classe ouvrière juive dans les années 1890, signifiant une nouvelle alliance laïque qui illustre la manière dont la fiction que consacre Cahan au mariage plaide paradoxalement pour une laïcité qui dépend du judaïsme orthodoxe lui-même.

“AT ‘HOME’ IN PANAMA”: SPACE AND SPATIAL POLITICS IN THE SHORT STORIES OF ERIC WALROND

AND CARLOS “CUBENA” GUILLERMO WILSON

The focus of this essay is on the representation of black West Indians in post-construction Panama in selected short stories by Eric Walrond and Carlos “Cubena” Guillermo Wilson. This is important for the simple reason that migration from the Anglophone Caribbean continued well into the late 1920s and that by that time, one could begin to identify a generation of black West Indians who were born in Panama. After construction ended, contrary to what the Americans and the Panamanian government believed, many West Indians did not immediately return home but remained in Panama (Senior 291). According to Olive Senior, many West Indians had “already established permanent settlements in Colón, Panama City, Bocas del Toro and elsewhere” (291). And, as Velma Newton points out, the community rose from a few hundred in the 1850s to almost 36,000 by the 1920s (Silver Men 150). 1

The following analysis focuses on the stories “The Wharf Rats” and “Tropic Death” from Eric Walrond’s collection Tropic Death and “The Family” and “The Flour Boy” from Short Stories by Cubena by Carlos Guillermo Wilson. It will engage both authors’ stories in a comparative reading—firstly Walrond’s “Wharf Rats” with Wilson’s “The Family,” and “Tropic Death” with “The Flour Boy.” By critically assessing and theorising the formal, structural and narrative features of these stories, this article reveals certain responses found in these authors’ work that can be attributed not only to their shared Panamanian connections but also to the differences in style and generational

1. Senior puts the figure at almost 40,000 (291).

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concerns. In addition, the collections themselves may be viewed as resistance narratives in the sense that the act of writing about such social conditions may be seen as an act of resistance. Here the writers create narrative voices that refuse to be silent but speak boldly about the violence and trenchant poverty attending the many characters in the stories.

The title of this contribution draws its significance from two major concerns. The first part “At ‘home’ in Panama” signifies the ambiguous nature of home for migrants and their descendants within a host country where dwelling places are sometimes not places of hospitality but more often of hostility, so that the use of the term home here is ironic. The second part of the title points to the many ways in which migrants are placed in these locations. If we take Michel de Certeau’s idea that “space is a practiced place” (117) or place in action, then what we are looking at here is the politics of space, which is the concern of this essay; one that underlines its focus on how the characters in these short stories negotiate space.

Both authors write collections that dramatise the plight of West Indians who migrated to Panama during construction and settled there after the opening of the canal. Eric Walrond was born in 1898 in Georgetown, British Guiana, to a Barbadian father and a Guyanese mother (Parascandola 11). His father was one of the thousands of Barbadian men who went to Panama looking for work during the construction of the canal and in 1906 he, along with his mother and siblings, relocated to Barbados. Eventually, in 1911, because of economic difficulties, the Walrond family migrated back to Panama (Parascandola 11-12). While living there, they faced many of the discriminatory practices depicted in his fiction and in the essay “White Man, What Now”—he recalls enduring prejudice “because of [his] British nationality” (280); thus the story “Tropic Death” can be viewed as a means of telling not only his personal experiences, but also as a way of speaking for those who are unable to do so, such as the oppressed West Indians.

Wilson’s short stories are a representation of and a response to the endemic racism which his family experienced in Panama (Stephenson Watson 32). Wilson, who is also called “Cubena,” is a third generation Panamanian-West Indian, who was born in Panama City in 1941. He is the adopted grandson of English-speaking West Indians who came to Panama to work during the canal construction period. This allowed him, as both witness and victim, an insider view of the systemic discrimination, which became a “feature” of life for black West Indians and their descendants. The title of Wilson’s collection Short Stories by Cubena reflects his alternative name, a Hispanicized version of Kwabena, which in the Asante culture of Ghana means “Tuesday” and links him to his African roots (33). As an Afro-Panamanian, Wilson, as well as his fellow Panamanian of West Indian descent, Gerardo Maloney, and Afro-Hispanic, Costa Rican author Quince Duncan, are all concerned with the Black experience in Central America (Jackson, Canon 72-73), which they depict in both prose and poetry. Richard L. Jackson, who has written several texts on

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Black writers and literature in Latin America, states: “Wilson is primarily concerned with the plight of the ‘new’ black Panamanian, the chombo, the black descendant, like himself, of English-speaking West Indians . . . who came in to dig the Canal” (Canon 181; emphasis in the original).

It is Wilson’s focus on the racial and social injustices suffered by West Indians in Panama that led to the censorship of his work, which was published outside of Panama (Jackson, Black Writers 180). Wilson, because of his heritage and place of birth, is bilingual and, in order to privilege the plight of Afro-West Indian descendants in Panama, he writes in Spanish. Smart, in Central American Authors of West Indian Origin, argues that Wilson, Gerardo Maloney (who also writes in English), Quince Duncan and other lesser-known Afro-Hispanic authors deliberately write in Spanish as a means of asserting their Hispanic identity (50) in a region where their West Indian surnames identify them as the “Other.” Spanish, as the language of their fiction, has a twofold effect: it positions them as Hispanic in a mostly unaccepting society while restricting their contact with the West Indians with whom they share a linguistic and cultural heritage. Walrond’s and Wilson’s first-hand experiences provide these two authors with special insight into the deplorable social and physical conditions under which West Indians lived in Panama. As black, English-speaking outsiders, West Indians were deemed the “Other” in all areas of their lives, whether it was their work, social lives or living conditions.

exCluding the otheR: SoCial StRuCtuReS oF exCluSion

Conceptually, the present discussion is guided by two interrelated notions on spatiality or spatial configurations: David Sibley’s notion of geographies of exclusion and Johan Galtung’s work on structural violence. Being socially ostracised is, as Sibley notes, one form of geographic exclusion. According to Sibley, a person’s place in a society is contingent on social spaces, which are structured to exclude people based on various standards of education, age, race, gender, sexuality, physical and mental disability (xvi). He also identifies “people’s feelings about others” (3) as some of the earliest motivators for social rejection because “who is felt to belong and not to belong contributes in an important way to the shaping of social space” (3). In addition, Galtung, with his concept of structural violence, identifies three forms of violence, which are “personal, structural and cultural” (“Cultural Violence” 291). He first defines violence as

An avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs, or to put it in more general terms, the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible. (Galtung, “Violence” 167)

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Physical violence is a result of both personal and structural violence whereby the government-sanctioned system gives individuals permission to exert brute force on those who are deemed unworthy.

Along with personal and structural violence, Galtung identifies cultural violence as encompassing various features of a culture such as language, art, religion, anthems, flags or even science, which are employed to exert or legitimise structural or physical violence (Galtung “Cultural Violence” 291) on the unwittingly uninformed or unaware “outsiders.” Galtung argues that “[c]ultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right—or at least not wrong” (“Cultural Violence” 291) and it is this trifecta of personal, cultural and structural violence, linked to race and ethnicity, which West Indians experienced in Panama.

Both Sibley and Galtung focus on the production of space in constructing areas of exclusion and structural violence and the effect of this on “marked” bodies in social spaces. This calls to mind Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of the role of space in the exploitation of the working class in their residences and workplaces in his own discussion of Eugène Sue’s Paris-based novel Les Mystères de Paris. In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci sees the economy, for example, as a homogenous space unified by necessary laws. Similarly, in the stories studied here, regulations in Panama are designed to keep blacks in a certain place as a means of controlling a ready supply of cheap labour. Gramsci’s views can then be linked to Henri LeFebvre’s, as the latter goes further to evidence this fact in late capitalism’s use of spatial politics, construction or reproduction of certain social relations, through regulations, to further exploit the labouring classes.

These concepts, condensed here, form the basis of my discussion of the ways in which both Walrond and Cubena represent the experiences of those West Indians in post-construction Panama and of later generations of West Indian-Panamanians in Panama. Being socially ostracised is, as Sibley notes, one form of geographic exclusion. He is of the view that one of the ways to deal with social problems, such as those dramatised in Wilson’s and Walrond’s stories, is through a process of spatialisation where the unwanted, ambiguous and threatening are put “elsewhere” (xv). Such social and ethnic groups as West Indians can be found in Panama, who suffer the effects of isolation and exclusion, leading them to a form of social death. Airall, in his autobiographical text, explains that

Acquiring a quality education was a challenge for students who lived in the silver sector of the Panama Canal. Once graduation from eighth grade had been achieved, there were no high schools available for continuing education, minimizing the educational options for many students. (59)

Like Walrond and Wilson, Airall and his family directly experienced the effects of marginalisation and exclusion in Panama since there were no high schools in the

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Canal Zone for black youth (60). Parker clarifies that while a “secondary school was opened for white children, . . . for the black students there were only advanced classes in agriculture, sewing, and domestic service” (384). Thus, being cut off from access to necessary services and even rights of citizenship prevented the West Indians from being fully engaged in the Panamanian community (Jackson, Black Literature 81). In my brief discussion and application of the concept of social death here, I will borrow a few ideas from Patterson’s use of the term as a preamble to a later discussion on its representation in the fiction of Walrond and Cubena. Being aware that this is a literary study and not a sociological one, I will limit myself to an overview of Patterson’s idea of social death, especially as it assists my discussion. Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death, discusses the impact of slavery on a slave’s social status in different communities worldwide. He notes that there are two forms of social death: “[I]n the intrusive mode of representing social death the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside—the ‘domestic enemy’ . . . He did not and could not belong because he was the product of a hostile, alien culture” (39). He goes on to describe the extrusive form of social death as

An insider who had fallen, one who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community because of a failure to meet certain minimal legal or socioeconomic norms of behavior. The destitute were included in this group, for while they had committed no overt crime their failure to survive on their own was taken as a sign of innate incompetence and divine disfavor. (41)

To explain Patterson’s concepts, I will employ the example of the legal and social structure of the United States during slavery, when black people lived in an extremely hostile environment that reflected the intrusive form of social death. In the post-slavery, pre-civil rights era, black Americans were forced, through legal, social and economic structures, into the extrusive form of social death, subsisting within the boundaries of a society that deemed them of lesser importance than white people. In their portrayal of the subjugation and trenchant poverty of West Indians and their descendants in Panamanian society, Walrond and Wilson describe black people as suffering from both forms of social death. These authors depict, as in graphically portraying through a direct prose, symbol and metaphor:

[The intense] hatred, prejudice, and disrespect shown toward chombos (emphasis in original) in Panama … [which was] inspired, not [only] by their color but by their Protestant religion, their foreign origin, and their use of English as a first language. (Jackson, Black Literature 72)

Stephenson Watson explains the cultural differences this way:

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There are cultural and linguistic differences between the Afro-Hispanics and the predominately English-speaking Afro-Antilleans. Furthermore, the black West Indians are a heterogeneous ethnic group because they are composed of blacks from the English-speaking Antilles of Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and the French-speaking Antilles of Martinique and Guadalupe. (2)

These distinctions are merely some of the justifications for the disparaging treatment of West Indians in Panama.

exiSting on the PeRiPheRy in “the WhaRF RatS” and “the Family”

Both Walrond’s “The Wharf Rats” and Wilson’s “The Family” depict the struggle of black families, trying to survive in post-construction urban Panama. Walrond’s story shows the daily plight and deplorable living conditions of West Indians in Panama through the story of a St. Lucian man, Jean Baptiste, a “coal passer at the Dry Dock” (Walrond 68), and his family. Similarly, Wilson’s illustrates the deadly effects of grinding poverty and misery on a mother and her family in the Maranon district of urban Panama. Both stories bear a strong relation to what may be seen as naturalism, that form of writing that represents, often in sordid, gory detail, the lives and living conditions of characters often at odds with their social environments. Both Walrond and Wilson demonstrate how their characters inhabit the social spaces, as Afro-West Indians, in the margins of their Panamanian society. Walrond’s social realist aesthetics focuses on the harsh realities and trenchant poverty of West Indians in immediate post-construction Panama, often with harrowing results, as seen in “The Wharf Rats” and “Subjection.” While it is tempting to see Cubena’s prose as simply naturalist, I agree with the observation in the introduction by Ian Smart that his aesthetics comes closest to a “tremendismo” seen in the writing of the Spanish “modernist” José Camila Cela (11). Tremendismo is an exaggerated form of naturalism, which arose out of a need to evoke the readers’ tremendous shock at the horrors of the Spanish Civil War as described in The Family of Pascal Duarte by José Camilo Cela (Norton Dictionary 881). Adalberto Ortiz applied Cela’s style to a literature such as that of Cubena, whose fiction expresses rage at the social injustices exacted on Hispanic people of African heritage who, in 1941, were retroactively denied Panamanian citizenship (Kutzinski 192). This style of writing then became known as tremendismonegrista. In Cubena’s work, tremendismonegrista is a literary device, more so an extreme exaggeration through which the reader’s attention focuses on the social biases suffered by Afro-Panamanians as well as West Indians and their descendants. Smart agrees that Wilson’s use of tremendismo in his short stories is “an artistic device for giving full vent to the immense outrage that wells up . . . as he looks deeply at the world around him” (12). It is in this sense that Wilson’s

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use of tremendismo may be seen as an act of resistance. In an interview with Elba Birmingham-Pokorny (1991), Wilson concurs with Smart’s assessment of his literary intent and states:

In my work I denounce the poor education, the unemployment, the hunger and the racial discrimination that is contributing to the slow death of people of African descent all over Latin America. My intention is to disseminate and make public the fact that we “Afro-Hispanics” do exist despite constant denial and, most importantly, that we have goals, dreams, and aspirations of a better future for ourselves and the coming generation. (127)

Thus, Wilson’s work is a formal accusation against a Panamanian society where, for several generations, the honing of exclusionary practices has prevented West Indians, who contributed to its advancement, from participating as citizens endowed with all benefits and rights. According to Smart, this writing includes “a literary overindulgence in the horrendous, engaged in for definite artistic ends” (11), as seen in a story like “The Family” with its grossly exaggerated naturalism. As black, English-speaking outsiders, West Indians were deemed the “Other” in all areas of their lives, whether it was their work, social lives or living conditions. Richard Jackson asserts that “[b]lack identity is probably more complicated in Central America than anywhere else in this hemisphere, given the added Afro-Caribbean factors of color, language, and culture” (73). This problematic black identity is a factor which I take under consideration in my discussion of both authors.

In “The Wharf Rats” the main character, Jean Baptiste, has a Martiniquan wife, Celestin, along with his three sons Philip, Ernest and Sandel, as well as his wife’s adopted daughter Maffi, who performs all the household tasks (Walrond 68-69). In a simple first reading of the story, one may be prone to dismiss it as merely a representation of the mundane existence of a family living in deplorable social conditions. The story ends with the unexpected death of a son, Phillip, who is attacked and killed by a shark while diving for coins thrown by passengers from the deck of incoming ships. The straightforwardness of this story is not an indictment of the author’s storytelling skills but rather a feature of his use of realism to dramatise the lives of West Indian immigrants who reside in post-construction Panama. A deeper analysis of this story must begin with its title, “The Wharf Rats,” which has two interrelated connotations. Firstly, it likens the family to rats that thrive in slums, a place of poverty where the downtrodden in society reside. This reflects the social status of West Indians, who are represented here by Jean Baptiste and his family, as the lowest members of society, living on the outskirts of the community. Secondly, the name wharf rats also refers to boys who, like Phillip in the story, frequent docks while scavenging for their survival by diving for coins thrown from ships. The space of the West Indian in Panamanian

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society as one of poverty and marginalisation is denoted by both meanings. As Sibley notes, “in the routines of daily life, most people are not conscious of domination and the socio-spatial system . . . [and] there are some groups for whom exclusion is a part of their daily experience” (76). This is indicative of the way of life of Jean Baptiste and his family. Here, I will take my cue from Patterson, who refers to this type of existence as social death. The living space of West Indians like Jean Baptiste and his family, who live in “murky tenements perilously poised on the narrow banks of Faulke’s River; in the low, smelting cabins of Coco Té” (Walrond 67), exemplifies the “intrusive mode” (44) which was discussed earlier. This place, at the periphery of society, also known as the “Silver Quarters [that] harbored the inky ones, their wives and their pickaninnies” (Walrond 67), is where individuals not born in Panama are relegated to because they are considered outsiders. These neighbourhoods consisted primarily of West Indian families who moved to Panama during construction and remained there after the Canal was completed.

Although Celestin lives at the edge of Panamanian society she, like the other West Indians, is a necessary, if mostly unwanted, part of the society, performing much-needed tasks such as being a seamstress for the wife of a Gold Roll employee (Walrond 75). Celestin exists in a “liminal state of social death, [which is] institutionalized marginality” (Patterson 46), and one of the outcomes of social structuration. Patterson argues that even though the person is socially dead he/she is still a part of society and “institutionalized marginality” (46) was one way of taking care of this problem. For a little while, Celestin is allowed, under guidelines defined by society, to move from the socially dead West Indian world to the “normal” world of the Gold employees. By crossing from the West Indian “Silver” tenements into the “Gold” community, Celestin moves into a state of liminality because she is not allowed to live permanently in that world but is only allowed in to service its inhabitants and then return home. Celestin recognises her place of alienation in this society and as such she is envious of the life of the “Italian wife of the boss riveter at the Dry Dock—the lady on the other side of the railroad tracks in the ‘Gold Quarters’ for whom she sewed—who got a fresh baby every year and who danced in a world of silks and satins” (Walrond 75). State-sanctioned segregation created individuals who were perceived as a “threat to the moral and social order” (Patterson 46) and who accepted their social displacement as a means of survival (Patterson 46). West Indians, like Celestin, are not allowed to fully participate in society even though they are required to carry out tasks that native Panamanians cannot or will not do. The railroad tracks are the physical line of demarcation between the living spaces of the Gold and Silver roll employees and they also define the place of social death for West Indians.

At the end of the story, Jean Baptiste’s son Phillip is killed by a “shark, a bloaty, stone colored mankiller” (Walrond 83) and while Phillip is dying, Maffi is at home in the kitchen humming about obeah and the story concludes

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with the statement “[p]eace had come to her at last” (Walrond 83). While one may conclude that Phillip’s death is a result of Maffi’s use of obeah because he spurned her affections, my own view is that Phillip’s death is symbolic of the consequences West Indians suffer when they attempt to move beyond their predetermined social position. His death occurs because of the system of structural violence within Panamanian society, which creates that spatial configuration referred to by Sibley as geographies of exclusion. The shark that kills Phillip is “a pale-green monster . . . [having been] [f]attened on the swill of the abattoir nearby and the beef tossed from the decks of countless ships in port . . . [so] it had become used to the taste of flesh and the smell of blood” (Walrond 74). Here, the shark represents the Panamanian society that created social structures to deny entry to the West Indians. Having ingested the offal received from Panamanians, the shark inflicts a violent death on Phillip for venturing into the sea, its residence. Just as the West Indians were prohibited from living in the “Gold” neighbourhood, the sea is the shark’s exclusive domain and Phillip’s death is an example of how Panamanian society uses violence to maintain its social order.

Similarly, in “The Family,” Wilson demonstrates how the spatial arrangement of Panamanian society is designed and used to sideline those, such as West Indian blacks, who are deemed inferior. For the family in the final story in Wilson’s collection, there is no escape from the misery of structural violence in the Maranon district of urban Panama. From the beginning of the story, we are introduced to the harsh, deplorable living conditions of this neighbourhood—with its “perennial putrid odors” (Wilson 95)—where the family lives in a “gloomy hovel, its walls of faded colors [and an] asphyxiating atmosphere . . . impregnated with the odor of old clothes [whose] squeaky door generally remained closed” (Wilson 96-97). In this closed, suffocating world of “social death,” the family exists in the manner of tenement rats—in a sort of underworld, outside the margins of society; placed there by a geography of exclusion that marked them as the socially undesirable. Wilson’s use of tremendismo builds a crescendo of pity, sadness and ultimately rage at a society that refuses to allow black people even the basic means of survival. The family’s ability to earn a living is encumbered by a cruel and relentless system of marginalisation, designed to completely devastate the black community in Panama. The constant battering by the agents of structural violence on the father of the household results in a man whose

spirit was completely broken. Life’s harsh blows had given him no respite. At the business establishments where he tried to get a job so to earn his livelihood, he was rudely and loudly told, “we don’t want no blacks here.” At other places, they would spit out at him a disdainful, “There’s no work for people of your kind... Get out of here, big-lipped nigger!” The insulted man would walk away in silence, indignant, thinking that when a black man is down and out, even the dogs urinate on him. (Wilson, “The Family” 96)

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The suffering of the barefoot man may be seen as an example of what Galtung defines as “[t]he avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs, . . . or the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible” (“Violence” 167). The social structures in Panama allow for the deliberate alienation of black people and particularly West Indians (seen also in Walrond’s “Wharf Rats”)—including in cases where this alienation and exclusion can be seen as avoidable. In “The Family,” such exclusionary practices result in the father’s inability to support his family of “six malnourished, painfully rickety and very frail children . . . [who] looked like death warmed over, and all over their arms and legs there were sores full of pus that harbored worms” (Wilson 96). This description of the children’s physical condition is intended to demonstrate Wilson’s rage at the consequences of the endemic alienation of black people in Panama and serves as another example of social death caused by the violation of basic human rights. The methodical exclusion of the socially dead results in two types of violence, which are structural (or indirect) and personal (or direct) violence. Galtung asserts the former type is indirect because “there may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (“Violence” 171). This is reflected in the inability of the father and mother in “The Family” to earn enough for basic survival. In an act of desperation, the mother swallows rat poison and with considerable effort “drown[s] her six offsprings (sic) in the perennially full tub of water” (Wilson 101) because “she is only able to provide three times a day . . . a rusty little can or a gourd half filled with water for each member of the family” (100). The feelings of sadness and anger which are provoked by this mother’s murder/suicide are representative of the author’s use of tremendismo which channels his rage at an unjust Panamanian society.

This ending exemplifies the view held by Smart in his introduction to the collection that “Cubena’s short stories end with an explosive flash that abruptly elucidates the full sense of the preceding narrative” (16). Of the story’s ending itself, he writes that this illustrates “the sad history of a mother who finds a macabre solution to the desperate daily problem of physical survival for herself and six fatherless children” (17). However, as gruesome as the drowning of the children is, it is society’s inhumane reaction to the incident that is captured in the following newspaper headline: “MORE BLACKS DIE, THIS TIME AT HOME AND NOT IN A BARROOM BRAWL” (102). Here, Wilson represents the callousness and indifference towards blacks in Panama that has become a feature of his aesthetics of tremendismo negrista. Wilson’s work is a formal criticism of a Panamanian society where, for several generations, the honing of exclusionary practices has prevented West Indians, who contributed to its advancement, from participating as citizens endowed with all benefits

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and rights. As Jackson states, “Cubena does not plead for human decency: he shocks the reader into humanistic understanding through tremendista description” (Black Literature 79); and in this sense, it is his plain, spare style that eloquently “shocks” to such an understanding.

ChildRen aS the “otheR” in “tRoPiC death” and “the FlouR boy”

The final story in Walrond’s collection is the title story “Tropic Death,” which is set in both Barbados and Panama. It focuses on a young boy, Gerald Bright, and his mother Sarah, who have journeyed from Barbados to Panama to reunite with Sarah’s husband Lucian, who works there as a tailor. The voyage parallels that of the West Indian migration to Panama as well as Walrond’s own family’s move, which makes the story semi-autobiographical (Parascandola 12). By including features of his personal life, Walrond conveys a credibility to those stories in his collection which represent some aspects of the West Indian experience in Panama, such as racism and poverty. The cinematic images that infuse Walrond’s prose with realism, as he “shows” the audience/reader life in Panama, result from his personal experiences growing up there as a young boy.

“Tropic Death” is structured in three distinct sections, which move from the embarkation in Barbados to the voyage at sea and finally the arrival and life in Panama. The journey for Gerald and his mother begins at the wharf in Bridgetown with the reader accompanying them through Walrond’s extensive and lavish use of imagery. The story commences with the young boy Gerald “standing on the old ale and cask strewn quay at Bridgetown watching a police launch carry a load of negro country folk out to a British packet smoking blackly in the bay” (Walrond 161). The “camera” then moves from the activity on the water to that on the land where George finds himself:

Alone and strangely aware of the life bubbling around Nelson’s Square. Under the statue masses of country blacks had come, drinking in the slow draughts of wind struggling up from the sea. City urchins, who thrived on pilfering sewers or ridding the streets of cow dung which they marketed as manure; beggars, black street corner fixtures, their bodies limp and juicy with the scourge of elephantiasis; cork-legged wayfarers, straw hats on their bowed crinkly heads; one-legged old black women vending cane juice and hot sauce. (Walrond 161-62)

Walrond, through the filmic gaze of his narrator, presents the reader with a view of the flurry of activity surrounding the departure of the group of Barbadians migrating to Panama. The commotion in the city betrays the presence of a large number of migrants departing for Panama, as well as their importance to the island. Many men were engaged in numerous lawless activities around the wharf, which is reflected in a literary snapshot of the

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Old boys, young boys, big boys, little boys; boys who’d stolen on the wharves at sundown and bored big holes in the wet sacks of brown sugar; boys who’d defied the cops, and the sun, and the foaming mules, or the ungodly long whip of the driver, and skimmed on to tin cups the thick brackish froth the heat had sent formenting up through the cracks in the molasses casks; boys who’d been sent to the Island jail for firing touch bams at birds . . . or for flipping pea-loaded popguns at the black-cork-hatted police. (Walrond 162)

As a result of the reduced global demand for cane sugar, as well as of their inability to earn a living wage on the white-owned plantations (Richardson 9), black Barbadians existed in extremely impoverished conditions during the post-emancipation period. This situation derived from both external (European) and internal (Barbadian) structures of violence, designed to marginalise the “Other.” Migration to Panama afforded Barbadians an opportunity to escape poverty and build a new life away from the local social constraints.

The narrative then embarks on a journey similar to that of the migrants, as it moves from the quayside to the launch which transfers the family to the larger ship waiting on the horizon. Walrond’s descriptive prose enables the reader to “sit” in the boat with Gerald as it swiftly pulls away. Meanwhile,

[a]way back, on the brown and gold of the horizon, he saw speeding into nothingness the scows and warehouses and the low lofts of Bridgetown. Now the sea rose—higher, higher; zooming, zooming; bluer, darker—the sky, dizzier, dizzier; and in the heavens war was brewing-until the shroud of mist ahead parted and there rose on the crest of the sky the shining blue packet! (Walrond 164)

For Gerald, and other migrants like his family, this is their last glimpse of Bridgetown before they board the waiting ship for a life in Panama. In this extract, the repetition of the words “higher,” “zooming” and “dizzier” emphasise the speed of the boat as it moves over the rising waves as well as a feeling of excitement some migrants may undergo about embarking on this trip. The “war [that] was brewing” (Walrond 164) refers to dark clouds which are forming in the sky, and these represent the fear of the unknown some of the passengers may be feeling as they leave the familiarity of their home island.

Life on board the ship mirrors the social stratification of Barbados in which white people were entrenched at the peak and black people occupied the lower level. During the voyage to Panama, Gerald and his mother Sarah, like many others, reside outdoors on the lower deck where they are exposed to the heat of the sun. On this level, the merciless sun, “fried sores and baked bunions, browned and blackened faces, reddened and blistered eyes” (Walrond 164). Some of the travellers sleep in “hammock[s]” (165) while others lay on the floor amongst a “carpenter’s awl and a bag of peas and yams . . . a basin of vomit . . . [and] a cargo of potatoes” (165). The black, lower class travels in chaotic squalor, while the white people, like the “Bishop of the West

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Indies . . . [and the] red-faced Britons . . . [are based in the] salon on the upper deck” (Walrond 164). This type of social division occurred aboard a ship and was quite normal, as documented by Arthur Bullard, who undertook a similar journey on a British steamship from Barbados to Panama, along with hundreds of West Indians. He observes:

About four o’clock I rowed out and went aboard. Such a mess you never saw—what the Germans would call “einSchweinerei” (emphasis in original). There were more than seven hundred negroes aboard, each with his bag and baggage. It was not a large boat, and every square inch of deck space was utilized. Some had trunks, but most only bags like that which Dick Whittington carried into London. There was a fair sprinkling of guitars and accordeons (sic). But the things which threw the most complication into the turmoil were the steamer chairs. Some people ashore had driven a thriving trade in deck chairs—flimsy affairs, a yard-wide length of canvas hung on uncertain supports of a soft, brittle wood. The chairs took up an immense amount of room, and the majority of “have nots” were jealous of the few who had them. It was almost impossible to walk along the deck without getting mixed up in a steamer chair. (30)

Bullard’s personal (non-fictional) account, employed here to emphasise the context in which Walrond’s fictional representations are set, corroborates Walrond’s description of conditions for the “black deckers” (164) who were being transported like cargo, without any consideration for their comfort. Bullard goes on:

We pulled up anchor about six. All the ship’s officers had moved into the saloon; it was the only clean place aboard—a sort of white oasis in the black Sahara. For fresh air the only available space was the chart-house deck. There was so much to do in getting things shipshape that none of the officers appeared at dinner. So I ate in solitary grandeur. The cabin was intolerably stuff, for at each of the twenty-four portholes the round face of a grinning negro cut off what little breeze there was. There was a great competition among the negroes for the portholes and the chance to see me eat. As nearly as I could judge the entire seven hundred had their innings. I faced out the first three courses with a certain amount of nonchalance, but with the roast the twenty-four pairs of shining eyes—constantly changing—got on my nerves. I did scant justice to the salad and dessert, absolutely neglected the coffee, and, grabbing my writing-pad sought refuge up on deck. (30-31)

Here, Bullard exposes the inequity of social conditions within the British colonies and how this taints every area of life for black people. Black Barbadians were migrating to earn better wages and provide for their families outside of a system of structural violence which denied them opportunities to do so locally. Yet, even as these marginalised Barbadians are journeying with hope for a different life, these same structures of violence, of “Othering,” are also accompanying them in their migration. Bullard provides evidence of these migrating structures of marginalisation when he escapes to “the saloon;

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it was the only clean place aboard—a sort of white oasis in the black Sahara. For fresh air the only available space was the chart-house deck” (30), while the black people remain outdoors where “[i]n a fetid mist odors rose. Sordid; tainted; poised like a sinister vapor over the narrow expanse of deck” (Walrond 165-66). On the ship, as in society, there are clearly defined areas which black people are prohibited from entering, even if the space is much more confining. Furthermore, when he complains about being watched by dozens of black eyes while sitting in the officers’ quarters eating a lavish meal, Bullard is simultaneously ignoring the plight of the hundreds of black people on the boat who are unable to enjoy the same quality food and comfortable surroundings. Walrond’s narrator provides this instance of the migrants’ means of survival in similar conditions: the migrants survive through catching

[f]ish, lured onto the glimmering ends of loaded lines, [and which] raged in fruitless fury; tore, snarled gutturally, for release; bloodied patches of the hard blue sea; left crescents of gills on green silvery hooks. Some, big and fat as young oxen, raved for miles on the shining blue sea, snapping and snarling acrobatically. For a stretch of days, the Wellington left behind a scarlet trail. (Walrond 166)

The activity of catching fish, described here, is an avid representation of the strategies of survival adopted by the migrants.

In the next stage of the migration, Gerald and his family settle in Panama with his father, Lucian. Walrond’s narrator shows the racism and abject poverty of the migrants in Panama through his vivid descriptions of their living conditions. Gerald and his family are surrounded by poverty, but here—in contrast to Barbados—they have no extended family to provide assistance. After arriving in Panama, Gerald awakens from a nap and looks downstairs, where a

[h]alf-sick, half-clothed little child was crying. Standing above him was a lank, black, cruel-faced woman, brewing a cup of hot milk. As soon as the milk was shifted from one cup to the other, she would turn and stamp at the little boy on the floor.

“Where am I to get it from?” she screamed at him, “shut up, I say-shutup-before I cuff you—what do I care if you haven’t eaten for two days—yourstomach burning you—well go to sleep—you been already—well go again—sleep, sleep—it will do you good—it will make you forget you ever had a belly.

“Think I pick up smoked sausage? I’ve got to buy it. And what have I got to buy it with? Filth! May the heavens consume you! Shut up, I say! Who cares whether it is seven o’clock—or eight o’ clock—or nine o’clock? Let me—be! The baby’s got to eat, and you’d better be gone, you’re too noisy.” (Walrond 177)

The use of an extended quote is necessary to effectively demonstrate the mother’s response to the desperate lack of food for her children. The explosive tirade of this mother contrasts poverty and family in Panama with the situation

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in Barbados. Parascandola comments that several stories in the collection Tropic Death resonate with the struggles Walrond’s family faced in Barbados, and which prompted his mother to sell what property she had and move to Panama to find her husband who had migrated there earlier (12). Walrond’s narrator recounts Gerald’s joy when he recalls the soup containing “[r]ock hard crabs, tight-fisted dumplings, little red peppers, Cayenne peppers . . . and parsley and white eddoes” (169), which he and his mother enjoyed at his uncle’s house. On these occasions, after having fed them, Charlie would give Sarah “a bag of potatoes to take home” (169). Richardson notes that sharing of food was a normal practice between friends and family in Barbados, but following the return of former Canal workers, who had grown accustomed to paying for food, this practice diminished significantly (183). The types of compassionate relationships which allowed Sarah to sustain her family do not exist in Panama and consequently, this mother has no extended relatives or friends to share food with her during periods of hardship. Since she is unable to purchase food, the family must endure hunger.

The stark difference between Gerald’s life in Barbados and that in Panama is quite evident in Walrond’s portrayal of the two places. In Barbados, the Bright family lived in Black Rock, which was a

dinky backward village; the gap rocky and grassy, the roads dusty and green-splashed; the marl, in the dry season, whirling blindly at you; the sickly fowls dying of the pip and the yaws; the dogs, a rowing, impotent lot; the crops of dry peas and cassava and tannias and eddoes, robbed, before they could feel the pulse of the sun, of their gum or juice; the goats, bred on some jealous tenant’s cane shoots, or guided some silken black night down a planter’s gully—and then only able to give a little bit of milk; the rain, a whimsical rarity. And then the joys, for a boy of eight—a dew-sprayed, toe-searching tramp at sunrise for “touched” fruit dropped in the night by epicurean bats, almonds, mangoes, golden apples; dreaming of the day when the cocoanut tree planted at the particularly fecund part of the ground would grow big enough to bear fruit; waiting, in the flush of sowing time, for a cart loaded to the brim to roll rhythmically over the jarring stones and spill a potato or a yam. After silence had again settled over the gap, he’d furtively dash out on the road and seize it and roast it feverishly on a waiting fire; he’d pluck an ear of corn out of the heap his mother’d bring up from the patch to send to town, and roast it, and stuff it hot as it was in his tiny pants pocket and then suffer excruciating rheumatic pains in his leg days after. (Walrond 166-67)

Walrond’s vibrant prose captures snapshots of Gerald’s life at home in Barbados, as it moves through various scenes which highlight how West Indians could sustain themselves by supplementing their food supply through rearing animals and growing crops. These scenes also depict the happy-go-lucky life of a young West Indian boy who was free to roam the neighbourhood daily in search of easily accessible food. However, in Panama, there are no fields with fruit trees for Gerald to roam while searching for something to eat.

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Instead, he spends his time in alleys pitching marble with neighbourhood boys, some of whom had “fly-dotted sores on their legs. [It was a] city of sores. Some of them had boils around their mouths” (Walrond 179). In Panama, there is only disease and hunger, as evidenced by the boys with sores all over their bodies and the mother with her hungry son who has not eaten for two days. Gerald does not spend his days wandering freely, as in Barbados; now he goes on “[s]ecret escapades to the alley below”:

he had to be careful of the boys he played with . . . [because] some of the boys would cheat, and say, “if you don’t like it, then lump it! Chumbo! Perro!” Some of them’d seize his taw or the marbles he had put up and walk away, daring him to follow. (Walrond 179-80)

My examination of the stories which are located within Panama depicts the challenges faced by the West Indian migrants. West Indians were forced to navigate a hostile natural environment as well as a designedly unwelcoming social space. In “Tropic Death,” Walrond’s vivid scenes provide the reader with a sense of realism that positions the migrant experience as one of unexpected trials despite the promise of easy money.

While Walrond’s harsh realism constructed a degrading and at times, sub-normal living space of West Indians surviving in post-construction Panama, it is in Carlos Guillermo Wilson’s naturalism that we see dramatised the abject and denaturalized spaces of the post-construction habitus in Panama.

Wilson’s collection of stories provides evidence of how the oppressed West Indian descendants function in their inherent roles according to the rules defined by an oppressive Panamanian society. In “Tropic Death,” West Indian migration to Panama is presented through the experiences of Gerald. Wilson, through his character’s gaze, exposes the abject poverty and discrimination endured by West Indians. As a child, Gerald is not immune to the endemic racism and is the victim of prejudice directed towards him by Panamanian children.

Likewise, in Cubena’s “The Flour Boy,” we see how certain exclusionary practices impact not only adults but also children, such as the unnamed nine-year-old protagonist of the story, “a little boy who exhibits psychologically abnormal human behavior” (Smart 18) as a direct result of the racist attitude directed towards him. For some authors, Laurie Vickroy suggests, “traumatized children provide not merely poignant metaphors but also concrete examples of the neglect, exploitation, disempowerment, and disavowal of communities and even entire cultures” (81). This is evident in the experiences of Afro-West Indian children in Panama narrated in these stories. Unlike other little boys in the neighbourhood who “wet themselves in bed . . . the boy who lived in room 33 in San Miguel, that most Panamanian of neighborhoods . . . ‘befloured’ himself in bed” (Wilson, “The Flour Boy” 33). Every night the young boy dusts himself with flour to hide or erase his blackness. Despite threats and beatings

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from his exasperated mother, the “hard-headed boy would not obey” (33). He continues his unusual, nightly ritual which “[e]veryday, everybody in the neighborhood commented on” (33).

The crude practice of the geography of exclusion in Panama is not only enforced by adults but also by the white children. The flour boy is shunned by a group of boys who play many games together but “as soon as he approached them they would reject him with jeers” (Wilson, “The Flour Boy” 35). This attitude exemplifies the protagonist’s social status as an outcast. It does not, however, appear as odd to him, because

[t]he ill-mannered boys threw mud on the white painted trunks of the leafy trees; they soiled the park benches with manure; they made fun of the elderly people in the park, they threw stones at the parakeets harboured in the trees. Not even the curious squirrels with their timid comings and goings managed to escape the wickedness of the band. (Wilson, “The Flour Boy” 35)

It seems to the flour boy that nothing is safe from the appalling actions of these boys and as such their attitude towards him is not unusual. Their conduct is enabled by the social structuration that defined whiteness as superior.

The flour boy tries to cope with his place as a social outcast by uncovering the causes of the gang’s terrible conduct such as when they “snatched away his mother’s gift from him . . . a bouquet of flowers [which] the demented boys tread and spat on” (Wilson, “The Flour Boy” 35). Because of his extremely inquisitive nature, which was noticeable from a young age, the flour boy is determined to account for the “gang’s repugnant savagery” (36). Here, I will argue that the protagonist’s inability to understand why the group of boys refuse to play with him is a result of the suffering caused by racism. Judith Herman suggests that “repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation” (96). The flour boy presumes the other children’s actions are “induced by some stimulus, and believing the cause of the frenzies to be color-related, every day he wore a different colored shirt” (Wilson, “The Flour Boy” 36). While the boy is ignorant of the true reasons for the antagonistic behaviour of the others, he endeavours to rationalise it by undertaking “a painstaking study of the case . . . [during which] [h]e discovered why the band behaved so barbarously. The color of his shirt was not the stimulus for the inhumane behavior, it did not really matter if it were blue, red, chocolate, yellow, green” (Wilson, “The Flour Boy” 36). However, he soon discovers the true reason for the “horrendous shouts, the obscene words, the looks of profound hatred [that] persisted” (36) and tries to cure the boys of their “chronic savagery, [and so] every night he would throw a pound of flour on himself [because] [t]he flour boy was black” (36). As Sibley states, the colour black “has been used in white societies to signal fear” (22), and the

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flour boy believes the source of the gang’s disturbing behaviour towards him is his skin colour. His efforts to heal the gang of what he perceives to be an illness caused by his blackness is symptomatic of child abuse as discussed by Herman. She states that “[t]he child entrapped in this kind of horror develops the belief that [he]/she is responsible for the crimes of [his]/her abusers” (105) and, as the cause of their perceived illness, he is determined to find a remedy for the situation. Therefore, despite his mother’s scolding, the flour boy “would listen to the warning with resignation, because he knew that tomorrow, today, and yesterday would be identical” (Wilson, “The Flour Boy” 33); he is unable to obey his mother’s admonition against “beflouring” (33) himself because of the damaging effects of the abuse he has suffered. These young boys’ conduct towards the protagonist of the story is a consequence of geographies of exclusion and structural violence which define all black people as inferior and thereby, socially dead. Certainly, we can see here that the flour boy is not a mere passive, supine victim of these exclusionary practices. Like some of the slaves under the plantation system, the flour boy has found his own idiosyncratic way of resisting this system of domination.

This essay has concerned itself with how the methodical and discriminatory construction of space in society negatively impacts West Indians and their descendants in Panama. Walrond and Cubena are especially suited for this because of their intimate knowledge of life in Panama. Their personal experiences—albeit during different times—imbue the narratives under consideration here with vivid descriptions of the ways in which structural violence and geographies of exclusion, which created zones of exclusivity, impacted West Indians and their descendants.

Sharon Babb

WORKS CITED

Airall, Guillermo Evers. Silver and Gold: Untold Stories of Immigrant Life in the Panama Canal Zone. Pittsburgh: Rosedog Books, 2014. Print.

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Birmingham-Pokorny, Elba. “Interview with Dr Carlos Guillermo Wilson.” Denoucement and Reaffirmation of the Afro-Hispanic Identity in Carlos Guillermo Wilson’s Works. Ed. Elba Birmingham-Pokorny. Miami: Colección Ébano y Canela, 1993. Print.

Bullard, Arthur. Panama: The Canal, the Country and the People. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914. Print.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

Galtung, Johan. “Cultural Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 27.3 (1990): 291-305. Print.

---. “Violence, Peace, Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1969): 167-91. Print.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Eds. and Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971. Print.

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Print.

Ho, Kathleen. “Structural Violence as a Human Rights Violation.” Essex Human Rights Review 4.2 (September 2007): 1-17. Web. 8 Apr. 2015.

Jackson, Richard L. Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1988. Print.

---. Black Writers and the Hispanic Canon. Ed. David William Foster. New York: Twayne, 1997. Print.

---. Black Writers in Latin America. Albuquerque: The U of New Mexico P, 1979. Print.

Kutzinski, Vera M. “Afro-Hispanic American Literature.” The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Volume 2. The Twentieth Century. Eds. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 164-94. Print.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print.

Low, Setha. “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Space and Place.” Signification and Space. Spec. issue of Semiotica 175.1/4 (2009): 21-37. Print.

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Parascandola, Louis J., ed. “Winds Can Wake Up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader. Detroit: Wayne State U, 1998. Print.

Parker, Matthew. Preface. Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal. 2007. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. xviiii-xxvi. Print.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Print.

Richardson, Bonham C. Panama Money in Barbados 1900–1920. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1985. Print.

Senior, Olive. Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and The Building of the Panama Canal. Kingston: U of the West Indies P, 2014. Print.

Sibley, David. Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Smart, Ian Isidore. Introduction. Short Stories by Cubena. By Carlos Guillermo Wilson. Washington D.C.: Afro-Hispanic Institute, 1987. Print.

---. Central American Writers of West Indian Origin. Boulder: Three Continents, 1984. Print.

Stephenson Watson, Sonja. “Los Nietos de Felicidad Dolores (The Grandchildren of Felicidad Dolores) and the Contemporary Afro-Hispanic Historical Novel: A Postcolonial Reading.” Critical Perspectives on Afro-Latin American Literature. Ed. Antonio D. Tillis. New York: Routledge, 2012. 30-50. Print.

“Tremendismo.” The Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought. 3rd edition. 1999. Print.

Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002. Print.

Walrond, Eric. Tropic Death. 1926. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2013. Print.

---. “White Man, What Now.” “Winds Can Wake up the Dead”: An Eric Walrond Reader. Ed. Louis J. Parascandola. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. Print.

Wilson, Carlos Guillermo. Short Stories by Cubena. Trans. Ian Isidore Smart. Washington D.C.: Afro-Hispanic Institute, 1987. Print.

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Cette étude se penche sur la représentation des noirs d’origine antillaise après la construction du canal de Panama dans une sélection de nouvelles d’Eric Walrond et de Carlos “Cubena” Guillermo Wilson. Ces deux écrivains dramatisent dans leurs œuvres le calvaire des Antillais qui, après avoir émigré au Panama durant la construction du canal s’y sont fixés après sa mise en fonction. L’intitulé de cette étude fait ressortir deux soucis majeurs. La première partie désigne la nature ambiguë du pays d’accueil, soit pour les migrants soit pour leurs descendants, pour lesquels les localités ne constituent pas toujours des lieux d’hospitalité mais des lieux d’hostilité. La deuxième partie renvoie aux nombreuses façons de placer les migrants selon une politique de l’espace. En d’autres termes, on s’interroge ici sur la manière dont les personnages négocient l’espace. Cette analyse porte sur “The Wharf Rats” et “Tropic Death”, tirés du recueil d’Eric Walrond intitulé Tropic Death, ainsi que sur “The Family” et “The Flour Boy”, tirés de Short Stories by Cubena, recueil de Carlos Guillermo Wilson. L’approche proposée est comparative : dans un premier temps, l’analyse porte sur “The Wharf Rats” et “The Family” et, dans un deuxième temps, sur “Tropic Death” et “The Flour Boy”. En évaluant et théorisant de manière critique la forme, la structure ainsi que les techniques de narration de ces récits, cette étude apporte des éléments de réponse sur le travail de ces auteurs, éléments qui pourront être liés non seulement à leurs liens panaméens, mais aussi à leurs différences de style et à leurs préoccupations de descendants d’immigrés. Les deux écrivains adoptent une voix narrative qui refuse d’être étouffée, un ton qui dénonce audacieusement la violence et la misère extrême qui affligent nombre de leurs personnages.

MARRIAGES, MIRRORS AND “EQUIVOCAL CONTRASTS” IN STORIES BY EILEEN CHANG AND ALICE MUNRO

Eileen Chang’s “Love in a Fallen City” (1943) and Alice Munro’s “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001) end with apparently promising marriages. Such outcomes are unusual for these two eminent practitioners of short fiction—China’s foremost modernist and Canada’s Nobel laureate—but then they are framed as unlikely, even fantastical. When Munro’s protagonist Johanna allows that her purchase will be a wedding garment, the response of the saleswoman in her local, small-town dress shop is telling. “‘Some days,’” she sighs, “I think how grand it would be, to be married and stay at home’” (12). It is a secret revealed, a dream narrative. “‘Maybe the man in the moon will walk in here and fall in love with me and then I’ll be all set!’” (12). Johanna, too, cannot help feeling it a “preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss” (6). For both, the aspiration has an air of unreality.

Everything we learn about the situation of Johanna, or for that matter that of Chang’s Liusu, suggests this preposterousness, this unreality. Charles E. May perceptively notes the fairy-tale elements in “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (29)—features not entirely missing from Chang’s story either. A woman like Johanna could surely only transcend herself in a fairy tale—a similar, maybe legendary context would be needed for Liusu to escape her own imprisonment. Yet we sense that neither story is actually of this kind—they are too realistic, too much permeated with an aura of disenchantment. These elements must be ironies, situations ripe for demystifying reversals. Some such project, some undercutting of desire or expectation or outdated generic norms would seem to offer itself as a theme in both stories—as indeed is surely a central undertaking of much realism. Such

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a reversal, even a “comeuppance,” to use narratologist William Flesch’s useful term, is what readers anticipate. Some dreamer, either protagonist or reader or both, must be taught a lesson.

Johanna and Liusu are certainly implausible Cinderellas. The former is a middle-aged housekeeper and nanny, taking care of her employer’s granddaughter in the absence of his ne-er-do-well son-in-law. The latter, divorced and relegated, seems doomed to be a foil for her younger sister, a mere pawn in the games of her grasping family. Johanna, too, is the prospective victim of a cruel plot hatched by her ward Sabitha and Sabitha’s cleverer friend Edith, the unfolding of which will generate the suspenseful action of the narrative.

Liusu, in particular, is caught in a web of social, cultural and moral relationships which make her potential escape seem unlikely. Bullied verbally as well as exploited financially, she seems helpless. Her family is pushing her to return to the family of her worthless ex-husband (whose announced death opens the story), to pass the rest of her life ceremonially mourning him. Liusu’s mother even selfishly advises her daughter to adopt a child from his family, to give herself over to nurturing it in exchange for support—here as elsewhere in the story we seem to see the heartless parent of folk tale. Liusu’s own tears and lamentations, her desperate appeals, her flashback to a moment of early abandonment reinforce the idea of the lost child, wandering in the dark woods.

Part of what misleads us, the cunning of Chang’s narrative development, is that the pivotal moment occurs slightly before we are quite ready to grasp its significance. A plan is only just starting to be formed by the Bai family and the matchmaker Mrs. Xu to snare an eligible bachelor for Liusu’s younger stepsister, Baolu. The details have not yet been settled or revealed when we reach the powerful scene of Liusu’s shift to a new stance. Do things look good for her sister? she asks Mrs. Xu. “I think we are getting close” is the answer (119).

Liusu retreats to her room. Here she passes through moods of misery and self-pity, reflects melodramatically on the passing of time. But then she assesses herself in the mirror. “Good enough: she wasn’t too old yet” (121), she decides, and makes an inventory of herself, her waist, breasts, skin. “Her face was fairly narrow, but her eyes were set well apart. They were clear, lively, and slightly coquettish” (121). Liusu here is not actually “coquettish” per se—rather, she sees herself as potentially so, with all that might imply. Listening to the huqin music that threads through the story, she dances. Then, suddenly, electrifyingly, she smiles “a private, malevolent smile” and the music, her inner music anyway, “came to a discordant halt.” Outside, the huqin plays on, telling “of fealty and filial piety, chastity and righteousness” but these are now “distant tales that have nothing to do with her” (121-22). One deadly smile—she has apparently flown free of the whole web of meanings implied by the huqin’s traditional narrative and the cultural values it reinforces. She will ensnare the man, whose name she does not even know yet, wrest him away from the innocent Baolu.

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Every mirror scene, as both stories remind us, is triangular, involving the viewer, her image, and the imagined others who are also seeing that image. Liusu has triangulated her understanding of her situation, adding the apparently crucial element of the image that others see to her calculations. Seeming to escape self-pitying solipsism, she has seen herself differently, imagined a different narrative with, as it were, a different soundtrack. Power lies in desirability and is activated by the mimetic or triangular desire famously identified by René Girard. Liusu has not only recognized her desirability to others—potential lovers, rivals, authority figures, all parts of what Girard helped us understand as an endless skein of mimetically connected networks of desire—but has been mimetically induced to desire herself, or be confident in herself, through the imagined desires of those others. She has danced alone in literal terms though clearly, in imagination, in the contrasting world of the mirror, she was dancing with those others, in their admiring or resentful gaze.

And she seems to assume, following a related intuition, that the ancient tale that the huqin is orchestrating is an imposition of others’ modelling. This recognition means she is no longer affected, no longer desires what that tale and its music are trying to make her desire. In Girard’s terms, she feels she has escaped the subject’s position—he or she who is drawn to imitate the desire of the other—and assumes that of the model, directing desire towards herself. Still the escape, if it is one, is paradoxical from the start. If the music ends for her, the music to which she was dancing, is the transcendence she aspires to, the power, the very desirability that will supposedly rescue her, is all this still available? With whom now can she or will she really dance? The note struck is discordant. What she desires to escape, to dominate, is also what she continues to desire.

Johanna, meanwhile, lured into romantic hopefulness by the forgeries of Edith and Sabitha, has her own confrontation with her image, that might at first glance seem opposite in meaning to that of Liusu. Yet it is better understood as one of several mis-directions and partial revelations Munro uses. One such technique involves subtle shifts in point of view. We are at times given Johanna’s perspective, allowed to see her thoughts and feelings and plans. However, at a moment when an interior view might have clarified much in her character and intentions—such as at the very opening of the story—we only see her from the outside, through the station agent’s eyes, and are duly told about her somehow argumentative teeth (1), her hair, her peremptory manner.

Must she not see herself as others do? Mirrors, again, are the test. Johanna confronts one, at the entrance to the dress store, and the point of view switches to her own:

They did that on purpose, of course. They set the mirror there so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies, right away, and then—they hoped—you would jump to the conclusion that you had to buy something to alter the picture. Such

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a transparent trick that it would have made her walk out, if she had not come in determined, knowing what she had to get. (6)

We might also be tempted to think Johanna is “self-conscious.” But the actual point is her sharp, even aggressive analysis of the situation, and her prioritization of her own will and purpose. Soon there is another mirror—it is, after all, a dress shop. Yet again, as we might expect, she seems to internalize such judgments, as she tries out clothes. She “avoided the glass like poison,” at least “till she’d got the skirt straight and the jacket done up” (7). When the saleswoman wants to have a “peek,” Johanna’s internal commentary is comic: “Peek all you want to, [she] thought, it’s a case of a sow’s ear, as you’ll soon see” (8). The comedy, of course, is that Johanna and the saleswoman are basically accurate in their assessment of her looks, but the reader’s amusement, or for that matter, sense of pathos, might tend to obscure Johanna’s capacity for hard-headed judgment. And mirrors reveal different things, other truths. As the two women reluctantly come to the inevitable conclusion about the ensemble they both coveted, focus shifts to the saleslady: “The woman’s face changed in the mirror. She stopped smiling. She looked disappointed and tired, but kinder” (8). The mirror view, the mirror truth, also allows for an escape from artificiality, from commercial insincerity and an opening into kindness, as well as what may be a salutary realism.

“‘The thing is,’” she says, “‘you have a fine figure, but it’s a strong figure’” (8). It’s a small moment of female solidarity, but perhaps also of that kindness. Its accuracy, even for those reasons, is hard to assess. Like Liusu imagining how others might still find her desirable, the two women are triangulating. They settle on a different, less ambitious outfit, implicitly comforting or even congratulating themselves in having rejected the siren call of their desires. They retrench, rationalize, modifying and softening the contrast between the unavailable and the real Johanna. The saleslady compliments Johanna on her eyes: “‘You don’t need to wear velvet. You’ve got velvet eyes’” (9). Within limits, Johanna is now prepared to see this. Although, “[i]t wasn’t that she had suddenly started thinking she was pretty or anything” (9). This is comic, too, but the tone has shifted, because the picture has altered. She has seen something in the mirror, reflected and reinforced by the saleslady, and she has bought that and, like Liusu, will go into battle with it—but has she, in fact, fallen for the “transparent trick”?

Here, too, in short, in the two different visions we have had of Johanna—wearing the dress of desire, as it were, and that of ostensible realism—there is uncertainty, paradoxicality. There is still an outer world, other people, like the station agent, who will also see what has been seen in the mirror—they are present, implied by the scene as well. And there is the world of the saleslady’s flowery imaginings, but also of her more measured compliments. These worlds are in play, their relationship ambiguous.

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Arriving in Hong Kong on her risky expedition, Liusu is struck by the “murderous confusion” of the colors of the commercial billboards “mirrored in the lush, green water” (131). This latest mirror seemingly reflects the sales that people must make of themselves here, even foreshadowing her own potentially tragic fate. And this does seem to be the fate that begins gradually, insidiously to unfold. Her first steps are missteps. She tries an ancient Chinese woman’s style, lowering her head in modesty—but this deliberate catering to her target, Fan Liuyuan, soon reveals its absurdity. He mocks her, appeals to her pride, taunts her to begin thinking in more modern ways (that of course better suit his purposes). Her assumptions about the power of the beauty she saw in the mirror over the patriarchal gaze, the effect of then coquettishly ignoring him, are badly misjudged with this seasoned dandy. His countermove indicates a certain insight into her, however, as he proposes bringing her to a primitive place where feelings can be laid bare and artifice shed. He allows her to glimpse, that is, in himself as well as in her, a mirrored longing for meaningful love. Yet this too is a move, and not the last one, and the two continue their struggle, in pages of sophisticated dialogue. Under Chang’s skilful management our understandings and expectations grow but we can come to no sure conclusions. Is Liusu mercenary—does love even matter to her? Is Fan the sensitive soul he sometimes suggests, or a mere opportunist? Chang is at her most ironically brilliant, detailing the layers of insight, misunderstanding, hopefulness and self-deception in both characters, but perhaps especially in Liusu, as she “assesses the situation” (141).

It turned out that what Liuyuan cared about was spiritual love. She approved entirely, because spiritual love always leads to marriage, while physical love tends to reach a certain level and then stop, leaving little hope of marriage. There was just one small problem with spiritual love: while courting, the man always says things that the woman doesn’t understand. Not that it matters all that much. In the end the marriage goes through anyway, and then you buy a house, arrange the furniture, hire some servants—and in such matters the woman is much more expert than the man. Given all that, Liusu felt that the little misunderstanding of the evening was not anything to worry about. (141)

This is wrong in so many ways that it too is comical, although Chang keeps a straight face. Perhaps because it will also, paradoxically and by unexpected means, prove correct.

Johanna’s emotional aspirations, her own fantasies and blind spots, are never exposed to quite this degree, although we do see her in the withering satirical gaze of the two teenagers reading her intercepted letter to Ken. Still Munro is capable of all of Chang’s precision and ironical deftness, for example in Johanna’s experience of romantic anticipation: “After Mrs. Willets,” the self-centered and impractical older woman for whom she had previously cared, “her heart had been dry, and she had considered it might always be so.

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And now such a warm commotion, such busy love” (53). The domestic and purposeful, the immature and innocent, so moderate and yet bustlingly ardent, although without a hint of the worldly or carnal. This is spinster love, comically juxtaposed with the sharp-tongued and forceful spinster herself—but of course the surprise is that this does not mean it will be unrequited. The innocent have their own power, and an absence of sexual worldliness does not mean a lack of acumen in other departments—an assumption readers have been tempted to make, and of which we are later surprisingly (and amusingly) disabused.

Having patiently and stealthily destroyed Liusu’s reputation in Hong Kong even while making no overt attempt on her person, Liuyuan suggests that she no longer has anything to lose by resisting him. It is a dark moment, and she “stares at him in shock, suddenly seeing how wicked” he is (151). But then as she works it out, she decides it is merely the next, and not necessarily the last move in the game they have been playing. She may be “riding the tiger now” (151) but she still has one advantage—having not capitulated yet, “he might come back some day, ready to make peace on better terms” (151). She retreats to Shanghai, without resolutely rejecting him. Yet her family is ever more unbearable, and once she has been made to see that long enough, his telegram arrives. Even her own mother implies she should sell herself—the cruel, folk-tale figure even more obvious—and this perhaps is the final straw. “Was she worth so little?” (153). She must face the dishonorable fate of mistress.

Fan Liyuan wastes no time and claims his prize on her first night back in Hong Kong. The terms in which this much-discussed scene is narrated are notably mixed, equivocal. He ambushes her. He is a “cruel and spiteful man” (154) who, even so, does love her, and yet treats her this way. Despite her obvious reluctance and the absence of anything resembling consent, what follows is nonetheless narrated in the language of mutuality, something “they” were doing, that both had long anticipated. The mirror, from which Liusu derived the confidence to try to make a new life, now ironically witnesses or even encompasses her apparent downfall:

She fell back against the mirror, her back tightly pressed to its icy surface. His mouth did not leave hers. He pushed her into the mirror and they seemed to fall into it, into another shadowy world—freezing cold, searing hot, flame of the forest flowers burning them all over. (155)

For Xiaoping Wang, the scene hearkens back to the eighteenth-century classic The Story of the Stone, “a cautionary tale about the dangers of lust,” and only “reveals the vulnerable and ungrounded nature of their relationship” (568). However, this is still the world Liusu chose to enter, in which her visible beauty to others is her truest reality and power. And by the same token this shadowy mirror land is also a territory of moral ambiguity in whose shelter the ignoble role of mistress is less shameful. It is the realm of displaced or imitative desires,

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not of essences. Here she seems at least temporarily released from her struggles in the web of patriarchal meanings and giddily accepts the implications of living in such a world, cared for, financed, even loved, but without moral shelter. She enters into a dizzy whirl of ambivalent domesticity, decorating, drinking, living a life that only mirrors that of a young wife, but is also unaffected by the normal, oppressive proprieties. In a moment of half-drunken craziness after Fan’s embarkation, she decorates her new walls with handprints of wet paint in dandelion patterns—a subtly memorable image of a certain kind of emancipation, even freedom. “Why not? Was it against the law?” (156).

Johanna, too, has been duped and is apparently oblivious to her moral and practical peril. Disaster seems to loom as she boards the train on her own romantic quest. Of course, there are substantial differences. Johanna’s attraction to Ken may be uninformed and even delusional, but it is genuine enough. Writing to him, she apparently finds a way to form a subjective self, rather than merely escape her situation in life. The girls’ forged letters trigger real activity; she begins to invent herself in the world of her own making. Narrative technique reflects this: coming to Gdynia, the point of view switches largely to her perspective. Johanna becomes the subject of her own story, a strong-willed woman taking control of a weaker and less disciplined man. Her “busy love” is busy indeed, scarcely needing a moment to pivot from fantasy to clear-eyed purpose, changing out of her store-bought outfit for the nonce and sizing up her intended as the kind of task she has had a lifetime of experience performing: something “right up her alley” (50).

So, desire and character matter—worlds are built of them. But then maybe fate matters more. In Hong Kong, the bombs begin to fall—history and war intervene, indomitable forces that exceed and dwarf human consciousness, dismantling everything artificial. Liusu and Liuyuan are temporarily exposed to the essence of life. The war bonds them in a subject-to-subject relationship: “They looked and saw each other, saw each other entirely. It was the mere moment of deep understanding, but it was enough to keep them happy together for a decade or two” (164). The dry understatement of course registers—nothing eternal is promised here. Yet now their relationship is meaningful. Liusu’s tears and her once again bowed head, when Liuyuan proposes marriage, remind us of what we had seen before, what we did in fact know about her still traditional femininity. She begins to discover or reveal her nurturing energies, finding in their temporary home an anchored point in a world of flux. Meanwhile Fan, in a pleasing irony, must perforce live up to the “spiritual” love he earlier professed as a ruse to obtain extra-marital sex while preserving his playboy freedom. He has not reformed himself, but war has done it for him. He spun fatuous tales of a primitive place of raw emotion—and war brought him there. He has met something stronger and more persistent than he is—this is his comeuppance.

For all her strengths, including the strength of her romantic innocence, Johanna needs to be just as lucky as Liusu. A string of amusing coincidences

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and unexpected outcomes turns the two girls’ malicious prank into an odd sort of romantic reality. Yet it takes both partners to realize what has fallen into their laps. Ken, too, comes to understand that he has met his match, not just in Johanna, but in a nexus of self-made disasters and other-driven confusions and happenstances. As magical transformation offers itself, he, simultaneously with the reader, seems to grasp that it was already a potentiality he had contemplated, even sought: “Thoughts of regeneration were starting. This is the change I need. He had said that before, but surely there was one time when it would be true” (50-51, emphasis in the original). Surely? He acquiesces, as Johanna and Liusu and Liuyuan do, because fate seems to anticipate desire. And readers acquiesce because fictional fate reminds us of what we somehow already knew.

Fate shares much with the literary device of irony—which is surely Chang’s point, and in a different way also that of Munro, at the end of each of their stories. Fate, like the author, knows more than we do, and what it knows stands in an ironical relationship to what we know or think we know—as Chang teasingly acknowledges when she repeats in her last lines the phrase she used in her first: “‘Oh, why go into it!’” (167). Why indeed? What chance gives here it could take away in a more “just” society, and these authors would doubtlessly be there to report upon it. They propose no social program but ask us to reflect on the random felicities of life against a dark backdrop of repression and failure. Their other stories may end less “happily”—certainly those of Chang usually do—but they are of a piece with the visions explored here, ironically resisting systematic application of any overarching philosophy or theory of explanation. Nor, for that matter, are such approaches turned into themes, including themes that try even-handedly to decide or even merely balance questions of fate and character. Story logic, disciplined by a particularized, attentive realism, produces a different vision of life than any such thematic design would do. In one of her few direct comments on the art of fiction, Chang argued against the adoption of a “main theme” and championed story itself. At most, she offered an organizing principle of “equivocal contrast” (“Writing” 19).

With such a procedure, neither fate nor character nor even one in conjunction with the other is necessarily endorsed. Toward the end of “Love in a Fallen City,” Chang raises such a possibility, only to dismiss it. After the proposal, the strolling Liusu and Liuyuan come upon a sign: “DR ZHAO XIANGQING, DENTIST.” A little like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg presiding over “the valley of ashes” (23), it hangs before a bombed-out lot, the dentist and his office destroyed by the same violent cataclysm that has made their marriage possible. Moved, Liuyuan returns to the verses from the ancient Book of Songs he had fatuously quoted to Liusu to justify his unwillingness to marry her: “‘Now you must believe “Facing life, facing death, distance…” How can we decide these things?’” (166). Chance could have had this bomb as easily fall on them. “‘Are you still saying you’re unable to make this decision?’” (166), she challenges him. No, no, he replies, “‘what I mean

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is….’” (166). Still he cannot ever really say what he means. Maybe “the gods” were behind it. What he said at the time “didn’t count” (166). And so on. His excuses are palpably lame—he really understands no better than she does. Or than we do.

Chang takes up the question as “Love in a Fallen City” concludes. “Hong Kong’s defeat had brought Liusu victory. But in this unreasonable world, who can distinguish cause from effect? Who knows which is which?” (167). Liusu herself of course cannot imagine that her needs could have produced such huge effects: she “didn’t feel there was anything subtle about her place in history” (167). But then, Chang slyly notes, “those legendary beauties who felled cities and kingdoms” (167) probably also felt that way. And “legends exist everywhere” (167) even if they do not always end this happily. As Karen S. Kingsbury points out, “devastatingly beautiful” women who cause the fall of historical realms feature among the tales evoked by the desolate sound of the huqin (319). It seems not all those tales are of “fealty and filial piety” or other forms of subservience. The equivocal contrast, then, is not simply between cause and effect, but between the legendary and the ordinary, between those who create fictions for themselves, or are the creations of the fictions of others. And such contrasts clearly stretch out into an art whose persuasiveness is a function of these very equivocations, between the world of the huqin and that of the mirror, between romance and reality, innocence and experience. And, perhaps most particularly, between readerly expectations and fictional outcomes—in the end we are given something we perhaps wanted, thought we ought not to want, thought we would not be given. Our comeuppance was in the lack of a comeuppance.

Munro, too, teasingly cautions us against our own expectations. Young Edith, hearing of the birth of Johanna’s child, is amusingly indignant at the unlooked-for outcome of her plot:

It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her—it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying to get its hooks into her. For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible on earth for the existence of a person named Omar? (52)

Readers are not Edith, exactly, but she does stand in for us as a kind of cautionary surrogate. In a way, she has been the author of Johanna’s romance, her fate. However, she has neither foreseen nor finally controlled the outcome. She has tried to enforce her own version of order on the life in her sphere, her own theme, where the clever and deserving, like herself, have dominion over the obtuse, ridiculous and embarrassing like Johanna. She takes Johanna’s failure to conform to this intuitively obvious hierarchy as a personal insult. Translating her Latin homework, she writes: “‘You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know—’” (52) and then in grim satisfaction concludes, “‘—what fate has in store for me, or for you—’” (52). This faux worldliness may satisfy a

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precocious adolescent, with her high estimation of her own potentialities—Munro captures to exactitude her preoccupied sorting through of her various selves, “former self . . . present self . . . real self” (52)—but the reader surely notes that even this formulation, salutary as it might seem to a young know-it-all, is not enough. The outcomes were unexpected but not finally unknowable. What Edith could not tell, and cannot even now, is the story—her theme got in the way.

“Reality,” Chang notes, “is unsystematic” (“From” 39) and she offers a simile: “like seven or eight talking machines playing all at once in a chaos of sound, each singing its own song.” The task of artists of every kind is to catch and “string together” (“From” 39) the occasionally detectable moments of “sad and luminous clarity” (“From” 39). The result is paradoxically unreal—if historians do this, they are writing fiction—and yet true (“From” 39). The contrast between the real and the fantastical is also, finally, equivocal.

Munro suggests another metaphor, in the thoughts of her heroine Juliet in the later story “Chance,” happily imagining her fate as the heroine in a Russian novel, “dreary, or tragic, or both” (54; Robert Thacker, 17, also notes this passage in a different context). It would not matter—“personal fate was not the point anyway” (54)—because what mattered, what “drew her in” (54), was the way this fate was somehow encompassed by the landscape going by the train window in Northern Ontario, “the indifference, the repetition, the carelessness and contempt for harmony, to be found on the scrambled surface of the Precambrian shield” (54). A “personal” fate is merely one story, hacked and abstracted from such recalcitrant materials, from which, as from Chang’s clattering chaos of mechanical activity, any number of different fates, or stories, could equally well be formed.

Yuhui Bao Beijing University of Chinese Medicine

Ian Dennis University of Ottawa

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WORKS CITED

Chang, Eileen. “From the Ashes.” Written on Water. Trans. Andrew F. Jones. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 39-52. Print.

---. “Love in a Fallen City.” Love in Fallen City and Other Stories. Trans. Karen S. Kingsbury. London: Penguin, 2007. 109-67. Print.

---. “Writing of One’s Own.” Written on Water. Trans. Andrew F. Jones. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 15-22. Print.

Flesch, William. Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner’s, 1953. Print.

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. 1961. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965. Print.

Kingsbury, Karen S. “Introduction” and “Notes.” Love in a Fallen City and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 2007. ix-xvii, 315-21. Print.

May, Charles E. “The Key to the Treasure.” Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Runaway, Dear Life. Ed. Robert Thacker. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 25-43. Print.

Munro, Alice. “Chance.” Runaway: Stories. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004. 48-86. Print.

---. “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. 1-52. Print.

Thacker, Robert. “Introduction: ‘Durable and Freestanding’: The Late Art of Munro.” Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Runaway, Dear Life. Ed. Robert Thacker. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 1-20. Print.

Wang, Xiaoping. “Eileen Chang’s Cross-Cultural Writing and Re-Writing in ‘Love in a Fallen City.’” Comparative Literature Studies 49.4 (2012): 565-84. Print.

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“Love in a Fallen City” (1943) d’Eileen Chang et “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001) d’Alice Munro ont comme point commun une histoire de mariage inhabituelle et offrent, par leur comparaison, une perspective révélatrice sur l’art de ces deux éminentes praticiennes de la nouvelle. Les deux textes incluent des scènes où figurent des miroirs, offrant un aperçu du fonctionnement de ce que René Girard a analysé comme relevant du désir mimétique. Mais ces récits sont également agencés de manière innovante pour contrecarrer ou réorienter ce que William Flesch a appelé le « comeuppance », une forme de punition voire de châtiment mérité, et en particulier celui que le réalisme inflige supposément au désir romantique. En fin de compte, les deux nouvelles soutiennent implicitement la notion de « contraste équivoque » que Chang perçoit comme le principe opératoire d’une fiction efficace, par opposition à l’articulation de thèmes tels que les rouages du caractère ou du destin, ou même de tout « thème principal ». Cette étude retrace les subtiles alternances d’attente, d’ironie et de surprise dans ces deux brillantes histoires afin de mieux comprendre les sources de leur pouvoir.

LOVE AND DISCIPLINE IN ALICE MUNRO’S “AMUNDSEN”

Alice Munro’s “Amundsen” is the first-person narrative of Vivien Hyde, a young teacher embarking on her first independent situation at a school housed in an Ontario tuberculosis sanatorium during the winter of 1945. The story centers on her brief relationship with the sanatorium’s director, Dr. Fox, couching its consideration of personal feelings within a larger contest between education and medicine. Though it has been read as a love story, “Amundsen” finally brings its greatest scrutiny to bear on the damage inflicted by disciplinary processes. The story stages a gendered conflict between education and clinical medicine, one that leads to a more troubling struggle, disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense. Fox’s ultimate control over Vivien registers so deeply in her consciousness that it controls her actions and reactions even years after the story’s main events. 1 The process through which this control is exercised will be observed through attention to earlier readings which see “Amundsen” as a love story, to the story’s carefully wrought sanatorium setting, and to the ways that the story’s central relationship thus unfolds within a specific episode in medical history. Viewed in this way, “Amundsen” is ultimately a story about concealing pain behind a veil of language.

What might account for the love story reading? Like countless tales of romance, “Amundsen” makes frequent use of temperature extremes to register emotional content. Vivien arrives at the sanatorium on a “raw day” with “air like ice” (Dear Life 32); as critic Magdalena Ładuniuk comments, “The coldness

1. “Amundsen” was originally published in the August 27, 2012 New Yorker. As is often Munro’s practice, she made changes to the story for book publication. This article refers to the later, Dear Life version of “Amundsen” except where the New Yorker version is specifically mentioned.

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in the story is overwhelming” (40). The short walk from the train to the school kitchen finds Vivien already “in need of its warmth” but she is made to leave the kitchen almost immediately to wait in an unheated cloakroom (33). Her bedroom, too, is kept very cold (42). When Dr. Fox invites Vivien to dinner, the heating of his house becomes a central concern, as does (for Fox) exposing her casual lie about having a boyfriend. “‘You know it shows when you’re lying,’” he says, “‘you get hot in the face’” (50). “If I hadn’t got hot before I did then,” Vivien reflects, “[m]y flush rose from my feet up and sweat trickled down under my arms” (50). Emotional exposure creates an unpleasant heat, one that Munro emphasizes by altering the language from the story’s magazine version (“you get red . . . If I hadn’t got red,” “Amundsen,” 64; emphasis added). After dinner Fox briefly touches Vivien’s back, the “firm pressure” creating “intensity from the little finger to the hard thumb,” which she enjoys (51). Fox offers to provide access to his home and heater while he is away, but Vivien worries that if she were in Fox’s house when he was not there “his past and future presence” would deny her “ordinary comfort,” bringing instead “a pleasure that was tight and nerve-racking rather than expansive. I would not be able to stop shivering even when it wasn’t cold” (52). Even the doctor’s imagined presence threatens to overwhelm conventional temperature boundaries.

The combination of hot and cold is echoed during the second dinner; as Vivien watches Fox cook she feels “a procession of sparks and chills” (53). The coldness of the outer landscape and even the inner institutional world gives way to the warmth of the romantic encounter, a warmth that can incorporate the effects of cold without the danger. This warmth may be “nerve-racking,” but is nevertheless welcome. As the story moves toward springtime and the climactic, failed wedding, a cold clarity returns. The dichotomy is aptly summed up, years before “Amundsen,” by Del Jordan, the narrator of Lives of Girls and Women, as she speaks of high school romances:

It seemed to me that winter was the time for love, not spring. In winter the habitable world was so much contracted; out of that little shut-in space we lived in, fantastic hopes might bloom. But spring revealed the ordinary geography of the place . . . Spring revealed distances, exactly as they were. (154)

It is April when Vivien and Fox make their wedding trip. The room they eat lunch in is “chilly,” and the “cold air” in the ladies’ room is “even more discouraging than that of the front room” (60). Fox leaves Vivien in a “nice and warm” (63) waiting room at the train station, but this is an impersonal, institutional warmth like that of the sanatorium kitchen. Her experience in the kitchen takes place shortly before she meets Fox for the first time; that in the station’s waiting room occurs immediately upon his departure. Anything like real heat, authentic emotional warmth, has only been experienced between these places, at Fox’s home.

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Unfolding over only a few months, and with very few encounters between Vivien and Fox, “Amundsen” may not seem the most obvious love story, but critics have treated as such. Charles May’s analysis, for example, concludes:

Perhaps it’s about the mysterious nature of the dichotomy of the physical and the spiritual, the male and the female, the romantic and the realistic. The attraction between male and female, what brings people together and keeps them apart, is always a mystery. Love stories never change; they always end in separation and thus perennially exist in the world of the imagination. (“Alice Munro’s ‘Amundsen’”)

Similarly, in Ładuniuk’s “Missions and Explorers,”

the most important lesson comes many years later, when Vivien accidently meets Dr. Fox on the street in Toronto. Then she is suddenly struck by a feeling . . . that she still loves this complicated man. Nevertheless, despite this crucial discovery, Vivien’s mission remains a failure. . . . The information about permanence of her love is only a burden for Vivien, who, although many years have passed since she left Amundsen, still feels exactly the same as on that depressing day when she was rejected by the love of her life. (44)

For both May and Ładuniuk “Amundsen”’s narrative unspools within an established love story formula. For May it is one formed with an armature of traditional binary oppositions: “Vivien’s attraction to Fox can be attributed to her romantic, fiction-based fascination with his mysterious maleness. His decision not to marry her derives from his desire to maintain his own fictional concept of maleness inviolate from any female involvement” (“Living” 55). Ładuniuk, pursuing her reading of the story as an archetypal quest, claims that “Vivien hopes that she will find fulfillment in love and marriage” (42). For either critic, “Amundsen” leaves its reader with a “lesson”: “attraction is always a mystery . . . love stories never change” (May, “Alice Munro’s ‘Amundsen’”), “Vivien . . . still feels exactly the same as on that depressing day” (Ładuniuk 44). Alternately, Cristiana Pugliese suggests that, Vivien “has learned nothing from her experience, nothing about ‘love’” (130 n.2), but her analysis focuses on the role of food in the story and spends much of its space reading Fox as an archetypal Janus figure. Such readings hardly seem to tell the whole story. As a love story “Amundsen” is surprisingly unconvincing and the lack of a place for the overarching presence of the sanatorium and classroom in such analyses is puzzling.

May states that “Amundsen” “may be misunderstood, and thus unappreciated, by some readers if they read it as if it were a simple realistic story about a particular woman who has a brief affair with a particular man” (“Alice Munro’s ‘Amundsen’”), saying too that “The questions – Why does Vivien agree to marry Dr. Fox . . . and why does Fox decide at the last minute not to marry her – cannot be answered by appealing to any simple psychology of the

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two characters as if they were particular people in the world” (“Living” 55). May echoes these points in a discussion of “Corrie,” another story from Dear Life:

The complexity of Munro’s short story is nothing like the complexity of a novel. In a novel, we are interested in particular people in a particular situation at a particular time and place. We make judgments on those people as if they were real people. But “Corrie” does not lead us to make those kinds of judgments; instead, it asks us to contemplate not a particular affair but the quintessential meaning of affair. (“On Alice Munro” 7)

Must a narrative’s mode of “complexity” shift simply as a result of its length? Must a short story be denied “particularity” simply because it is not a novel? To follow such dicta is to force short fiction into a procrustean bed from which only one kind of interpretation may arise: according to May, Munro’s characters do what they do because “they are enthralled by the formal demands of the story” (“Living” 53).

Again writing about “Corrie,” Isla Duncan is persuasive in her rejection of May’s prescriptivism:

I do not accept, first of all, his insistence on the distinctions between short and long fiction, nor do I wish to be discouraged from regarding the character of Ritchie as a deceiving “cad” (May’s term) or the character of Corrie as misguided and needy. I find it difficult to think of either in terms of abstract paradigms, representative components of some “classic phenomenon.” (64)

This disagreement is important since the genesis of the love story reading of “Amundsen” is in the non-particularized “types” that May and Ładuniuk see there. May claims that “Munro’s fictions build toward a tightly unified thematic pattern, not the construction of a mirror in the roadway” (“Living” 45). Yet, as do those texts likened by Stendhal to a mirror, her stories take place in specific historical and geographical settings. Their length alone cannot tell us not to treat them as examples of realism.

May alludes to Munro’s remarks in the essay “What is Real?” to argue that holistic, symbolic reading is the (literally) authorized interpretive strategy for her work. In a frequently quoted passage Munro outlines a spatial, rather than linear, approach to both reading and writing short fiction. She compares a story to a house rather than a road, preferring to “go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while” (224). Munro’s practice as a reader and writer may provide illumination for critics, but it need not constrain them. In an interview with New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman, Munro says “In ‘Amundsen,’ the girl has her first experience with a helplessly selfish man – that’s the type that interests her. A prize worth getting, always, though she ends up somewhat more realistic, stores him away in fantasy. That’s how I see it” (“On Dear Life”). This account should not constrain a critic either,

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but it at least allows one to consider the story in its particulars. “Amundsen” can tell us very different things if its world is retrieved from the sphere of symbolic patterning and returned to its specific materiality.

Consider the story’s sanatorium as not simply the fungible background to an archetypal love narrative, but rather the bounded physical form within which the discrete and gendered disciplines of medicine and education intersect. Dr. Fox practices the former and Vivien, as awkwardly isolated as Jane Eyre at Thornfield, the latter. Dr. Fox’s directions for running the school thus become a central example of emerging conflict between the discursive fields of the two disciplines. As I have shown elsewhere (Bernstein), character-authored documents are a favorite textual feature of Munro’s, and in “Amundsen” Fox alludes to one early on: “I’ve got some things I’ve written out about the kids and what I was thinking you might try to do with them. Sometimes I’d rather express myself in writing” (37). Later, when Vivien refers to the document as “instructions,” Fox counters: “What instructions? Oh, that was just some bits and pieces that went through my head. I never meant them to be set in stone” (41). Though Fox had left Vivien an out (“what you might try to do” [emphasis added]), his later disclaimer, characterizing the document as nothing more than fragmentary thought, is disingenuous, particularly as the paper has been introduced with an emphasis on the special status of writing.

These considerations do not yet touch on the document’s contents. In only 135 words, Fox launches a salvo meant to ensure that Vivien’s pedagogy will bear little resemblance to what prevails at schools for healthy children. The first sentence, “Usual notions of pedagogy out of place here” (39), amounts to a blanket dismissal of whatever disciplinary knowledge Vivien might bring to her work, its lack of a verb giving the pronouncement durable solidity. By the end of the first paragraph Fox dismisses other aspects of conventional pedagogy—“testing memorizing classifying”—as “nonsense” (39). To intensify this disapproval, Munro strengthened Fox’s prohibition of special attention to “Superior Children so-called” for book publication, so that the line “If they are smart in academic way, they can easily catch up” became “smart in questionable academic way” (“Amundsen” 60; Life 39; emphasis added in the italicized fragments). With the change, academics as a whole is called into dispute by Fox. Throughout his document features of standard mid-century Canadian educational practice and content are cast out: the “whole grade business,” “rivers of South America,” the “Magna Carta” (39). In their place Fox requests an unexciting environment that will find a middle-ground between “stress and boredom” (39). “Drawing Music Stories” are permitted, and games if they are not too exciting or competitive. Though the story goes on to show that Fox is acutely aware of pharmaceutical developments that will soon put his rest and surgery treatment for tuberculosis “‘out of business’” (51), the approach he recommends to Vivien resembles nothing so much as the model of female education in favor a century earlier. It is hardly figurative

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to say that Fox has given Vivien a prescription meant to preserve not only his patients, but the equilibrium of the institution as well.

The sequel to Fox’s presentation of directions is his surprise visit to Vivien’s class. She has discovered that avoiding information, stress, and competition results in “a pretend school” where a “docile and dreamy” mood overtakes the students and “a shadow of defeat” casts its pall (40). In other words, running a classroom according to the precepts of Fox’s rest cure reduces it to an extension of the porches on which the sanatorium’s patients statically take the dry winter air. Unwilling to settle for the “pretend,” Vivien decides “to take the doctor at his word. Or some of his words” and starts teaching geography. Organizing the lesson into a game one day she is surprised to see Fox enter the room, confiding “I was caught” (40). Fox quickly commandeers the class, making a joke out of the game and eventually dismissing the students early. He does not apologize or otherwise explain this assertion of authority, and when Vivien attempts to defend her efforts Fox discounts her suggestions. She later learns one of Fox’s patients had died in surgery that morning, so Vivien lets him off the hook, deciding “my anger did not turn out to be justified, and for that reason I had to feel more of a fool” (42). This is a statement of confusion more than understanding, since Vivien nullifies her own reaction through a near-reflexive sympathy for Fox. The entire scene brings to mind an observation Vivien makes about him during their first conversation, after she experiences an initial put-down. “He was evidently the sort of person,” she reflects then, “who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into” (36). When Vivien feels “caught” once Fox enters the classroom, she registers both the air of superiority with which he conducts himself and her now-learned uneasiness regarding his disapproval. That she later dismisses authentic reactions due to Fox’s equivalent of a bad day at the office demonstrates amply her stereotypical submission to a male counterpart.

Ładuniuk judges that Vivien “failed as a teacher” (42), but it seems more accurate to say that if she fails in anything, it is as a strong opponent to Fox. This is their only showdown about teaching. Once Fox has impressed upon Vivien the importance of following his directions (while denying that that is what he is doing) there seems little need to return to the issue, and his medically-based view triumphs. Though the scene in which Fox intrudes takes place only a third of the way through “Amundsen,” it is the last to show the classroom in any detail. The single remaining reference is a very brief one concerned with communicating the surprising number of student deaths during the month of March (58). With Vivien pedagogically vanquished, the narrative moves instead to the dinner scenes at Fox’s house, during which the doctor exerts a different kind of disciplinary control.

Before considering the dinners it is worth thinking a little more about the sanatorium as a setting. Not only is it the site of disciplinary conflict, but a monument to a specific era in the history of tuberculosis treatment. As Robert

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Thacker points out, “complex and detailed, Alice Munro’s stories proclaim her ‘connection’ to Ontario as both a place remembered and one she has lived in and knows well” (104). Thus it should surprise no one to find that the fictional town of Amundsen is modeled on a real place. Gravenhurst, 85 miles due north of Toronto (and 120 northeast of Munro’s native Wingham), became, in 1897, the site of Canada’s first sanatorium (Adams and Burke 431). Like Amundsen’s, Gravenhurst’s sanatorium (and its successors) were built just outside of town near a lake, and like Amundsen, Gravenhurst is on the rail line between Huntsville and Toronto. As she relates in “Working for a Living,” Munro herself was in the area in the early-1940s when her mother sold furs “at the Pine Tree Hotel” north of town (Castle Rock 141).

The tuberculosis treatments practiced at Amundsen’s sanatorium accord with those of Gravenhurst as well. Before the introduction of effective drugs in the mid-1940s, “Treatment consisted of conservative medical measures—rest, good nutrition, and fresh air—and, increasingly popular in the interwar period, surgical ‘collapse therapy,’ ranging from artificial pneumothorax . . . to disfiguring and often dangerous chest-wall and lung resections” (McCuaig 4). These are the procedures Vivien discusses with Dr. Fox at their first dinner (50-51). When Vivien says “my room was cold—every part of the building seemed cold” (42), she describes a centerpiece of early twentieth-century sanatorium treatment, exposure to cold, dry air. Writing from the site of the first North American sanatorium, Saranac Lake, New York, in 1910, Dr. Hugh Kinghorn attested to “the great curative value of pure cold air for pulmonary tuberculosis,” recommending that “the patient should . . . be in the air in all weathers, provided he has suitable shelter from rain, snow, or wind, and has suitable clothing” (73, 75). Fox’s sanatorium follows this advice; from her bedroom Vivien hears “the rumble of bed-carts being wheeled to the open porches for the icy afternoon exposure” (42). Indeed, so efficient was the regimen at Gravenhurst that a 1932 account stated the wards could be brought “from zero to 70 in a few minutes” (Wodehouse 24). Though Vivien’s classroom does not go so far, the open air approach even influenced the creation of preventoria, schools in which tubercular children “studied their lessons in unheated rooms with all the windows open, regardless of the weather” (McCuaig 163-64). Vivien’s sole description of the sanatorium’s exterior, “with its deliberate rows of windows, and its glassed-in porches at either end” (32), is a partial yet accurate description of the Gage Pavilion, the final sanatorium built in Gravenhurst, in 1923. Now called the Muskoka Regional Centre, the building yet survives. These details of mid-century tuberculosis treatment make the hot/cold dynamic of “Amundsen” more complicated than a simple matter of ardent hearts. Fox clearly feels that cold will help his patients, and details of the story suggest he sees it as a benefit in other settings as well.

As the two dinners and the sexual experience which follows the second demonstrates, “Amundsen” is less concerned with how Vivien runs her classroom

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than with how she negotiates a series of increasingly intimate encounters—the classroom scene among them—with Dr. Fox. That the encounters now move to a domestic setting—Fox’s house in town—signals a deepening of relations as the pair observe each other within in a new set of behaviors. On one level these scenes suggest the courtship narrative which has appealed to earlier critics. The first dinner provides the setting for Vivien’s lies to Fox about having a boyfriend and, when she is trapped once again, getting “hot in the face” over the exposure (50). The remainder of the meal does not pass without more of the doctor’s “teasing” and “superiority,” which Vivien thinks are “possibly his notion of flirtation” (50). Helping her with an apron during dishwashing Fox touches Vivien’s back (“he might almost have been taking stock of my body in a professional way” [51]). Finally, as they part, he gives her “a dry-lipped kiss, brief and formal, set upon me with hasty authority” (51). Both descriptions point to Fox’s inability to treat Vivien with anything but cool professional interest.

Authority, professionalism: before dining with Fox, Vivien has thought the house looked like the domain of “a regulated lone man” (43), and during the dinner, when he asks her if she thinks him rude in his inquisitiveness, she answers: “‘That depends. If you are interviewing me as an employer, no’”; to which he replies: “‘So I’ll go on’” (50). Though this exchange passes as banter, the reference to the sanatorium’s employment hierarchy still carries weight. After the meal, at Vivien’s prompting, Fox discusses the surgeries he performs and the new drug therapy on the way. Virtually the entire conversation, in other words, is either Fox quizzing Vivien “as an employer” or describing his own employment. Medical discourse has swept the field within the sanatorium and now extends its reach outward. Fox’s house is littered with books, and most of the few that Vivien names (concerning the Franklin Expedition, the Donner Party, and the Shackleton Expedition), have to do with polar exploration or death in the cold (48). The town itself is likely named after the famous Norwegian explorer, the first to reach both poles. Yet against such frosty forebears, Fox preserves the civilized veneer of the institutional man, going so far as to announce “I do intend to marry you” immediately following their first (and apparently only) sexual encounter (57).

The engagement comes with a new set of rules having a common focus on secrecy. Since Fox makes excuses for not buying a ring and prohibits Vivien from informing her grandparents of the match, it seems possible that he never intends to go through with the marriage. As with his pedagogical instructions, Fox depicts himself as outside of convention; earlier his target had been conventional educational content, here, with reference to the ring, Fox congratulates Vivien on not being “that idiotic conventional sort of girl” who would care about such a thing (57). Similarly, the wedding is to be “bare-bones,” so that Fox does not have to be around people “whose ideas he did not respect” (57). Whatever his true designs, Fox seems eager to play Rochester to

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Vivien’s Jane, moving the couple toward a small, secluded wedding without guests who might create inconvenient conflict.

The Jane Eyre echoes themselves work to expose a significant gap in “Amundsen.” While Charlotte Brontë devotes attention to Rochester’s charisma, his brooding, his confessions, and the affectionate raillery between him and Jane, Munro offers nothing to suggest a true, emotional connection between her characters. Instead, the story shows increasing manipulation on Fox’s part as he attempts to form Vivien into the feminine object he apparently wishes she were. He all but requires her acquiescence in administering the conventions of a Victorian female education. As they try to set a date for their first dinner, Fox tells Vivien not to attend a Gilbert & Sullivan performance for which Mary, a little girl who lives at the sanatorium, has sold her a ticket: “I did as he told me,” she recounts (47; emphasis added). When he picks her up she is “where he had instructed me to be,” and as he prepares their meal she leaves his kitchen for the front room, “feeling as if I had more or less been ordered to” (47, 48; emphasis added). During the meal he interrogates her in a way that suggests he is trying to confirm her virginity. Later he demands her complete accession to—and docility with—his terms for the engagement period and wedding, and after he suddenly and unilaterally backs out of that wedding he retains his control, putting her on the first train back to Toronto. Even as Vivien, during a Bluebeard-like moment, asks “if he has put girls on the train before,” Fox uses the imperative to urge her obedience at an existential level, telling her “‘Don’t be like that’” (63). Given the confusion between employer and lover that has characterized Fox’s and Vivien’s exchanges, it is perfectly consonant that as he dumps Vivien he also fires her. “‘I’ll write you a reference. You’ve done a good job,’” he tells her, adding, “‘You wouldn’t have finished out a term anyway—I hadn’t told you yet but the children are going to be moved’” (62). That he had concealed this news so central to Vivien’s future is in keeping, too, with his deception in even taking her to Huntsville in the first place.

As noted earlier, Vivien does speak of Fox-inspired “sparks and chills” and expects a potential “tight and nerve-racking” pleasure should she be alone in his house (53, 52). Though the story does not present an account of the couple in bed, Vivien allows afterward that her “passion could have been the surprise to us both,” and still later says that Fox spoke to her from a “deep place . . . when he was in bed with me” (56, 61). She feels simultaneously “flattered” and “ashamed” of that feeling when Fox removes Mary during their second dinner (56). In their absence Vivien eats several of Mary’s heart-shaped cookies, but on his return Fox tosses the rest of them into the snow (57). These scenes are the closest the story comes to conventional representations of love; far more plentiful are the details of Fox’s disciplining, controlling, Vivien.

Far from tangential, Mary’s appearance during that dinner, and indeed throughout the story, provides an intriguing complement to Vivien’s experience, further demonstrating the degree to which Fox attempts to form

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her as the object of his affection. Mary’s mother runs the sanatorium kitchen; that Fox is her unacknowledged father seems likely enough. She is of high school age and appears four times at roughly equal intervals in “Amundsen.” On each occasion but the last her presence works to further or sharpen Vivien’s involvement with Fox, in part through his objections to Mary.

Vivien first encounters her shortly after arriving at the sanatorium. Sitting cold and hungry in the cloakroom, feeling (prophetically, as it turns out) “like being punished at school,” Vivien does not dare to eat the contraband figs she has discovered, reasoning that they “would catch in my teeth, to betray me” (33, 34). Against this early demonstration of Vivien’s dutiful self-policing, Mary’s appearance is as chaotic as it is abrupt. Vivien, who has been told to remove her boots, and has had to balance awkwardly to do so, notices immediately that Mary kicks hers across the cloakroom. Mary is loud, overly familiar, and given to coarsely colloquial speech. Yet she also functions as a native informant in this strange place: “‘I know where everything is, I’ve lived here practically since I was born’” (34-35). During their conversation she establishes Vivien’s formal identity, first through her occupation and then, as a result of that occupation (“‘If you are a teacher shouldn’t it be Miss?’” [35]), her name. Vivien’s last name, Hyde, causes Mary to blurt out “Tan your hide,” apologizing immediately afterward (35). Though Pugliese suggests that “one cannot help thinking of Dr. Jekyll . . . after all, they are Dr. Fox and Miss Hyde” (134), it is Mary whom Vivien seems nearly to manifest as an opposing force, an alter ego. Mary serves as a symbolic vessel for the behaviors that Vivien must purge herself of to survive respectably in Amundsen, making Mary a truer Hyde to Vivien’s Jekyll.

Where Vivien is obedient to Fox, Mary is cruelly upbraided by him (“‘Enough out of you for one day,’” “‘You’re on the way to getting as plump as a young pig’” [35, 55]); he also speaks disrespectfully of her in her absence. Vivien registers Fox’s treatment of Mary during the second dinner as shockingly “brutal” (56). Though Mary, whom Pugliese likens to “the character of the helper in fairy tales” (133), can be a physical guide, as she is through the institution’s hallways during her first appearance, or pointing out a shortcut from town to the sanatorium during her second, the rest of her behavior is instructive only by negative example.

This is especially true during her final appearance, when she boards the train on which Vivien is returning to Toronto after the failed wedding. Mary’s boisterous partial attention reins Vivien in, keeping her from “jumping up and leaving the train and running to his house and demanding to know why, why” (65). During the drive to the wedding Vivien has entertained degrading erotic fantasies (“I believe I could lie down for him in any bog or mucky hole, or feel my spine crushed against any roadside rock, should he require an upright encounter” [59]), “aroused by [Fox’s] male unawareness of me” and excited, too, that he is a surgeon. “I would never admit that,” she says about her feelings about his job, and “I know too that I must keep these feelings to myself” she

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remarks about the fantasies (59). If her fantasies are effectively under erasure (if Hyde hides them) before the wedding, the reverse fantasy, of passionately appealing to Fox’s sense of justice, is also effectively rooted out, this time by Mary’s presence. Mary helps Vivien keep her cool.

In his page of teaching advice, Fox writes: “Some of these children will reenter the world or system and some will not,” later adding “very simple skills . . . necessary for Going into the World” (39). His courtship of Vivien is itself an education meant to prepare her for Fox’s personal system, entry into his world, where her subordination and obedience are central. Love is a peculiar term for a relationship that relies on instruction and supervision. Fox’s system is rather the cold and unfeeling discipline formed by a “regulated” man enamored of reading about perilous and icy death.

The fourteenth section of “Amundsen” is one of the time-compressing codas so frequent in Munro’s work. Though the section’s date is unclear, Vivien recounts that “For years” she expected to see Fox again; the reader is also informed that she is married and that her husband has children old enough to have debts. She refers to her and Fox’s faces as “time-damaged” (65). Whether the date is the 1960s or 70s or later is undiscoverable. The magazine version says “more than a decade later” (69), but even had the phrase survived Munro’s revision it would hardly be more specific than what remains. Seeing Fox in a crowded Toronto crosswalk Vivien has a final conversation with him: “He called out, ‘How are you?’ and I answered, ‘Fine.’ Then added for good measure, ‘Happy.’ . . . He called back to me once more: ‘Good for you’” (65-66).The story’s final paragraphs follow quickly on this thoroughly detached exchange. In its original magazine publication the lines read, “That was all. I went on home. Feeling the same as when I’d left Amundsen. The train dragging me, disbelieving. Nothing changes, apparently, about love” (“Amundsen” 69). The Dear Life ending contains several alterations: “For me, I was feeling something the same as when I left Amundsen, the train carrying me still dazed and full of disbelief. Nothing changes really about love” (66). These are interesting changes, as they mix greater certainty in some areas with less in others. In the later version Vivien adds “dazed” to the account of her condition when leaving Amundsen, but qualifies her later feeling as only “something the same” as the earlier episode rather than identical. Perhaps most importantly, while the earlier version suggests that love’s permanence is apparent, we are now told it is real. Vivien does not contend that she feels exactly the same at this distance of years, but her confidence in the reality of love is increased. It is a puzzling assurance, especially as it comprises the only instance of the word “love” in the entire text.

Vivien also comments on Fox’s eyes during this section. Noting that Fox indulges in no strong reaction to the meeting, “No breathless cry, no hand on my shoulder,” she only observes “that flash . . . when one of his eyes opened wider. It was the left eye, always the left, as I remembered. And it always looked so strange, alert and wondering, as if some whole impossibility had occurred to him,

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one that almost made him laugh” (66). The description refers back to Vivien’s first encounter with Fox, when he patronizes her about her college reading. “One eyebrow had risen, like a little peaked cap,” she recounts, going on to register the intimidating power of “that eyebrow, and his amused . . . expression” (36). It is just after this passage that Vivien first mentions Fox’s habit of setting conversational “traps” (36). Fox raises his eyebrow to Vivien again during the first dinner when she faces him down about her reading, but he follows with “‘Pardon me’” (49). All three of these accounts remain private to Vivien.

Predictably it is Mary who actually mentions Fox’s eyes to him. During the second dinner Fox attempts to shame her about her weight (55). Mary engages his caustic language, responding “‘Look who’s talking. You got one eye crooked to the other’” (55). The metaphoric implication that Fox cannot “see” straight is a dire warning for a doctor whose work depends on accurate observation and whose correction of Vivien hinges on reliable surveillance. Fox is a practitioner of, among other things, the clinical gaze, under which “disease becomes exhaustively legible, open without remainder to the sovereign dissection of language and of the gaze” (Foucault 196). Vivien is the one who records Mary’s insult, of course, and it is Vivien who brings Fox’s eyes up again at the story’s close. The eye references thus complete one more thematic chain pointing away from reading “Amundsen” as a love story. Whether his eyes are literally crooked or simply reflect his smug and patronizing personality, they hardly speak of love in the way that Vivien finally describes them. Instead they are reminders of Fox’s placement of Vivien into the position of the patient, “enveloped in a collective, homogeneous space” from which the clinician can engage in “showing by saying what one sees” (Foucault 196).

Considered in this way the late description of Fox’s eyes brings to mind the numerous examples throughout “Amundsen” in which Fox seeks to regulate and control Vivien. Thus it helps further characterize Vivien, who searches for a link to the past and finds it in a physical emblem of the disciplinary space she was expected to inhabit. No wonder, then, that she feels “something the same as when I left Amundsen” (66), since Amundsen, and what happened there, have so obviously not left her. Indeed, critic Christine Berthin sees in Vivien’s jilting there “the demise of the subject,” a subject who, “becomes raw, loses her symbolic armour, her protective skin and sense of self” (80). And as Ildikó de Papp Carrington pointed out many years ago, “many of [Munro’s] characters, especially her self-consciously ambivalent first-person narrators and her older protagonists, are ashamed and humiliated over and over again” (5). Years later, then, on the Toronto street, Vivien exhibits a steady gaze of her own, but she also encounters an internal nothingness where only the past, a past which Fox’s disciplinary formation has taught her to call “love,” resides. A narrator who spends the first two pages of her story describing the winter setting tells us virtually nothing about the setting at the end. Not only is the year unmentioned, but season, month, day, or time of day are all similarly

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omitted. Vivien has become the equivalent of the frozen adventurers of Fox’s books, but frozen in a waste of time (“For years,” she relates, “I thought I might run into him” [65]) rather than of ice. Like some of those explorers, she resorts to a kind of cannibalism, though hers is self-directed, seeking sustenance in the repellent fare of the failed Amundsen expedition.

Stephen Bernstein University of Michigan–Flint

WORKS CITED

Adams, Annemarie, and Stacie Burke. “’Not a Shack in the Woods’: Architecture for Tuberculosis in Muskoka and Toronto.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History (CBMH/BCHM) 23.2 (2006): 429-55. Print.

Bernstein, Stephen. “’LONGING TO SEE DOCUMENTS’: Writing and Desire in Alice Munro’s Longest Stories.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56.4 (2015): 355-68. Print.

Berthin, Christine. “Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear Life.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37.2 (Spring 2015): 79-87. Print.

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 1989. Print.

Duncan, Isla. “’A Cavity Everywhere’: The Postponement of Knowing in ‘Corrie’.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37.2 (Spring 2015): 57-67. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1975. Print.

Kinghorn, Hugh M. “The Employment of Cold in the Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis.” Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association 26 (1910): 72-84. Print.

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Ładuniuk, Magdalena. “Missions and Explorers: ‘Amundsen’ as a Key to Reading Alice Munro’s Other Stories.” Alice Munro: Understanding, Adapting and Teaching. Ed. Mirosława Buchholtz. Cham: Springer, 2016. 37-47. Print.

May, Charles. “Alice Munro’s ‘Amundsen’ and The Stories in Her New Book Dear Life.” Reading the Short Story. August 27, 2012. Web. August 10, 2013.

---. “Living in the Story: Fictional Reality in the Stories of Alice Munro.” Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art. Eds. Janice Flamengo and Gerald Lynch. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2017. 43-61. Print.

---. “On Alice Munro.” Critical Insights: Alice Munro. Ed. Charles May. Ipswich: Salem, 2013. 3-18. Print.

McCuaig, Katherine. The Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret: The Campaign Against Tuberculosis in Canada 1900-1950. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1999. Print.

Munro, Alice. “Amundsen.” The New Yorker 27 August 2012: 58-69. Print.

---. Dear Life: Stories. New York: Knopf, 2012. Print.

---. “On Dear Life: An Interview with Alice Munro.” Interview by Deborah Treisman. The New Yorker 20 Nov. 2012. Web. 23 Nov. 2012.

---. Lives of Girls and Women. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.

---. The View from Castle Rock. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.

---. “What is Real?” Making it New: Contemporary Canadian Stories. Ed. John Metcalf. Toronto: Methuen, 1982. 223-26. Print.

Pugliese, Cristiana. “Dangerous Appetites: Food and Deception in ‘Amundsen’.” Alice Munro and the Anatomy of the Short Story. Ed. Oriana Palusci. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 129-38. Print.

Thacker, Robert. “Alice Munro’s Ontario.” Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context. Ed. Marta Dvořák and W.H. New. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007. 103-18. Print.

Wodehouse, R.E. “Sanatorium Architecture.” The Canadian Hospital 9.9 (May 1932): 15, 24. Print.

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Les précédents commentateurs ont eu tendance à traiter “Amundsen”, nouvelle figurant dans le recueil Dear Life (2012) d’Alice Munro, comme une histoire d’amour formellement organisée à partir d’archétypes traditionnels. La présente approche se veut plus originale en mettant en évidence les spécificités géographiques et historiques du récit, qui permettent de la situer non seulement dans l’Ontario des années 1940, mais aussi dans l’histoire du traitement de la tuberculose et de ses institutions. L’analyse de plusieurs volets du récit montre que le souhait de discipliner donne lieu une obéissance presque masochiste et auto-policée. Ce que l’on pourrait lire de prime abord comme une histoire d’amour apparaît, de manière plus crédible, comme l’histoire d’un traumatisme qui laisse la narratrice vide, détachée et incapable d’apprendre quoi que ce soit de l’expérience amère qu’elle raconte.

DAD MUST DO WHAT DAD MUST DO: WHITE MASCULINITY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

IN GEORGE SAUNDERS’S SHORT FICTION

When approaching the work of George Saunders, scholars have tended to focus on the author’s calls for empathy, situating him within the New Sincerity movement 1 and interrogating the emotional affect generated by his work. Alex Millen, for instance, is interested in “why certain affective registers in Saunders’s fiction seem to strike readers today with particular salience and emotional force” (128). We can also look to Michael Basseler’s article “Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction” or Layne Neeper’s “‘To Soften the Heart’: George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy,” the latter of which claims that “Saunders’s postmodern fiction serves as the exemplar for early twenty-first-century American satire’s new attention to affect—to empathy” (282). As both this excerpt and the title of Neeper’s article suggest, critics (as well as reviewers) tend to categorize Saunders as a satirist, 2 and much of the published criticism on Saunders adumbrates the ways in which his fiction critiques contemporary America—David P. Rando’s “George Saunders and the Postmodern Working Class” and Richard Lee’s “Narrative Point of View, Irony and Cultural Criticism in Selected Short Fiction by George Saunders” offer two examples. Relatedly, other critics are concerned with Saunders’s work as dystopian fiction. David Huebert, for example, classifies several of Saunders’s stories as examples of “biopolitical dystopia,” a genre he describes as taking

1. For more on the New Sincerity movement see Kelly’s essays.2. In an early review of Saunders’s debut collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, for ins-tance, Michiko Kakutani calls Saunders “a savage satirist with a sentimental streak.”

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“place in spaces of carceral and corporeal confinement, often brought about by poverty” (106), while Juliana Nalerio—to quote her article’s title—is interested in “Class Consciousness, Violence, and Dystopia in George Saunders’ Vision of Contemporary America.”

Considering Saunders’s oeuvre, it is unsurprising that critics have tended to focus on empathy and affect, satire and social critique, his fiction as dystopia, or some combination thereof. What I find surprising, however, is the lack of discussion regarding gender—and masculinity, in particular—in response to Saunders’s fiction. Admittedly, Rando’s article considers gender briefly as it intersects with class in the story “Sea Oak,” but by and large the criticism on Saunders has been silent on the issue of gender, in spite of his fiction being inarguably about men: the majority of his stories are narrated by men, his protagonists and antagonists are overwhelmingly male, and women (often in the form of the protagonists’ wives) are regularly absent or silent, or when they are present, they more often than not serve as foils to their more virtuous but hen-pecked husbands. As Gillian Elizabeth Moore notes, “George Saunders’s persistent focus [has been] on the lived experiences of male white working-class US citizens” (59).

Take for example Saunders’s first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Published in 1996, it contains six short stories and a novella, all but one of which are narrated in the first-person by their male protagonists (the exception being the female-narrated “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror”). Every story in Saunders’s next collection, Pastoralia (2000), is either narrated by its male protagonist (including the title story as well as the oft-discussed and anthologized “Sea Oak”) or is focalized through a male protagonist (as is the case of “The Barber’s Unhappiness” and “The Falls”). Only the story “Winky” is focalized, in part, through the female character Winky—though the story alternates in its focalization between Winky and her brother Neil. Nine of twelve stories in In Persuasion Nation (2006) are narrated by male characters with the other three narrated by an objective, third-person narrator. 3 Similarly, Tenth of December (2013) is narrated almost entirely by—or focalized through—male characters with the exceptions being the stories “Victory Lap” (which alternates in focalization between its dual protagonists Alison and Kyle) and “Puppy.” However, perhaps this failure to consider issues of gender and masculinity in Saunders’s work should actually be unsurprising. As Joseph M. Armengol reminds us, “male authors have traditionally been

3. Adding to my surprise regarding the silence surrounding gender is the fact that In Persua-sion Nation features stories that engage quite explicitly with ideas of gender and sexuality, including “My Flamboyant Grandson” (in which a grandfather takes his ostensibly gay grand-son to the theater and reflects on his grandson’s performance—or lack thereof—of masculi-nity) and “My Amendment” (a story that satirizes those who oppose same-sex marriage by proposing America also ban “Samish-Sex Marriage” between people who do not obviously conform to traditional gender roles).

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regarded as writing about timeless and universal truths, rather than specific gendered issues” (16), while Ben Knights makes a similar argument: “there is a sense in which masculinity can be so taken for granted as to be invisible” (1).

I am not calling attention to Saunders’s focus on men to accuse him of misogyny or to argue that he is problematically unconcerned with women. Instead, I view his concern with masculinity as being a key—and overlooked—component of his satirical project. As others have discussed, much of Saunders’s work can be categorized as satire, and attention has been paid to the ways in which Saunders critiques such topics as American consumerism and materialism; “conformity in our simulated world” (Pogell 472); hypocrisy; “the dumbing-down of the media and politics” (Lee 81); and—most glaringly, in my opinion—the mythos of the American dream; “American individualism and self-determination” (Rando 443); and “US American exceptionalism . . . associated with sweeping grand narratives and self-confident myth-making” (Moore 59). Encapsulated in Saunders’s critique of the pervasive myth of the American dream is a call to empathize with those of the working class rather than to blame the disenfranchised for what some may perceive as their failure to achieve upward mobility or even self-sufficiency. 4 As Rando posits in his analysis of the story “Sea Oak,” Saunders “implicate[s] the middle-class reader whom the narrator seems to address. [He] suggests that such readers may be so blind to the working class that its experiences are otherworldly” (440).

This article means to connect Saunders’s critique of the American dream and his constructions of white masculinity. It is argued that Saunders’s fiction articulates a fundamental truth of the American dream: that it is, and has been historically, a dream for men, particularly those who identify as white and heterosexual. Furthermore, Saunders’s fiction calls attention to the ramifications facing a society that continues to believe in the promise of this mythos. Saunders demonstrates how those (men, in particular) who work hard and consider themselves virtuous but still cannot manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve upward mobility may feel that their manhood is being called into question, and as a result, may feel the need to reassert their masculinity in the form of physical violence. As Michael Kimmel explains, “men often feel themselves to be . . . constrained by a system of stereotypic conventions that leave them unable to live the lives to which they believe they are entitled” (Gendered 93). As a result, Kimmel argues, men may turn to violence to affirm their masculinity in an economic system that seems to deny it; Kimmel writes, “violence is restorative, a means to reclaim the power that he believes is rightly his” (Gendered 117). These connections between the American dream, white

4. Relevant here is the fact that Kakutani’s review goes on to characterize the ways Saunders’s fiction “delineates . . . the dark underbelly of the American dream: the losses, delusions and terrors suffered by the lonely, the disenfranchised, the downtrodden and the plain unlucky.”

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masculinity, and violence help to explain the male focus of Saunders’s fiction as well as the violence, murder, and death present in so many of his stories. 5

Saunders’s criticism of the American dream and the mentality of self-determination is evident across his body of work but most overtly when his work is at its most dystopian and satiric, stories set in a near-future or alternate-present where his characters are employed at relentlessly demeaning jobs that require absolute obeisance while failing to provide adequate pay or opportunities for advancement—as is the case in the stories “Pastoralia,” “Sea Oak,” and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” among others. Jennifer Hochschild, in Facing up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation, defines the American Dream “not merely [as] the right to get rich, but rather [as] the promise that all Americans have a reasonable chance to achieve success as they define it—material or otherwise—through their own efforts, and to attain virtue and fulfillment through success” (xi). Hochschild identifies four tenets espoused by the American dream ideology: that everyone regardless of background or identity is entitled to pursue their dream, that one may reasonably anticipate success however one defines it, that people should be rewarded based on their accomplishments rather than based on their needs, and that a measure of one’s success is also a measure of one’s virtue (18-23). 6 For Hochschild, the American dream serves an important ideological function in the American collective consciousness but only for those who have yet to be disillusioned:

[N]o one promises that dreams will be fulfilled, but the distinction between the right to dream and the right to succeed is psychologically hard to maintain and politically always blurred. It is especially hard to maintain because the dream sustains Americans against daily nightmares only if they believe that they have a significant likelihood, not just a formal chance, of reaching their goals. (27)

Saunders’s fiction is full of such “daily nightmares” and is populated both by characters who buy into the American dream, confusing the right to dream with the right to succeed, and those who have recognized that chances for success are slim.

5. In the first three stories in the first collection alone, the death toll is already high: in “Civi-lWarLand in Bad Decline,” Mr. McKinnon, the ghost of a Civil-War soldier with PTSD kills his entire family and himself; Sam—a veteran kicked out of Vietnam for participating in a massacre—ends up killing an innocent teenager and then the narrator. “Isabelle” depicts the murder of a black teenage boy at the hands of a cop, and, in “The 400-Pound CEO,” the nar-rator kills his boss through a bone-crushing hug.6. The equivocation of success (via industry) and virtue is prevalent throughout the history of American arts and letters. It can be found, for instance, in the rags-to-riches narratives of Horatio Alger, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson including “Compensation,” and Henry Ward Beecher’s Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects. These same beliefs are also denounced, of course, in works like The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman.

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Perhaps the loudest cheerleader for the American dream is the character Freddie of the story “Sea Oak.” Freddie, the boyfriend of the narrator’s mother, is not so much a character as he is a mouthpiece for the belief in self-determination: after the death of the narrator’s Aunt Bernie with whom the narrator, his sister Min, his cousin Jade, and their infant sons have been living, Freddie insists, “it’s time for you to pull yourselfs up by the bootstraps like I done and get out of that dangerous craphole you’re living at” (105). He does not, however, consider the differences between his own former situation and the current situation of the narrator, Min, and Jade. Freddie assumes—like many real-life believers in the American dream—that because he was able to set himself upon the path of upward mobility, everyone else should be able to do so as well if they only work hard enough. He does not take into consideration the fact that Min and Jade are women or that they are single parents who have the responsibility of caring for their young sons. As we find out soon after Freddie’s critique of their lack of work ethic, Min and Jade did work; however, this meant they had to leave their sons at daycare, where, when they went to pick them up one day, they found “Troy sitting naked on top of the washer and Mac in the yard being nipped by a Pekingese and the day-care lady sloshed and playing KillerBirds on Nintendo” (105-06). The text implies it is not that Min and Jade lack a work ethic, but that they have prioritized their sons’ safety over their need to work. Additionally, Freddie does not consider Min and Jade’s lack of education (they are currently studying to obtain their GEDs) or—as the story reveals—their ostensibly lower than average intelligence: early in the text, for example, Min and Jade “debate how many sides a triangle has . . . [and] agree that Churchill was in opera” (94). In Freddie’s view, the only barrier to Min, Jade, and the narrator achieving a better living situation is their failure to try.

While the text encourages readers to feel empathetic towards Min, Jade, the narrator, and Aunt Bernie, the character of Freddie is satirized: as the least sympathetic character in the text, his views on America are meant to inspire only derision and contempt. Freddie does not listen to Min and Jade as they try to explain the reasons they cannot work or cannot easily pull themselves up by their bootstraps (or “boobstraps” as Jade mishears 7); instead, Freddie barrels forward in his affirmation of the American dream:

“Let me tell you something,” says Freddie. “Something about this country. Anybody can do anything. But first they gotta try. And you guys ain’t. Two don’t work and one strips naked? I don’t consider that trying. You kids make squat. And therefore you live in a dangerous craphole. And what happens in a dangerous craphole? Bad tragic shit. It’s the freaking American way—you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous

7. Jade’s malapropism is more than merely humorous: later Aunt Bernie will instruct Jade to bend forward when she meets her new potential boss to let him see down her top.

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craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion. But at this rate you ain’t even gonna make it to the somewhat less dangerous craphole.” (106)

Freddie’s speech directly echoes Hochschild’s four tenets of the American dream. His assertion that anybody can do anything aligns with the first tenet that everyone, regardless of background, is entitled to pursue their dream. His belief that working hard means one day a person can expect to live in a “less dangerous craphole” equates to the second tenet that anyone can reasonably expect success. His refusal to consider their socioeconomic position as different from his own and his unwillingness to offer any sort of assistance resonates with Hochschild’s third tenet that people should be rewarded based on accomplishments rather than needs. Finally, his criticism of their lack of trying and his obvious disdain for the narrator’s occupation speak to the fourth tenet that success is to be treated as a sign of virtue (the narrator’s failure, then, is a sign of his immorality). It is through this fourth tenet that Freddie is able to blame the victims for the “tragic shit” that befalls them. Freddie’s speech encapsulates the perfidious blame-the-victim logic of the American dream: anyone can succeed; ergo, if you are not succeeding, you are not trying hard enough; ergo, you deserve whatever hardship has befallen you.

Both the American dream as an ideology and Freddie as a character attribute success entirely to individual hard work rather than to factors that may be outside an individual’s control, including social privilege, market forces, or mere coincidence. If we are able to blame the individual for their position in life by believing they simply do not work hard and are not trying enough, then it stands to reason that it is not our responsibility to offer any form of help. Hochschild articulates this premise as follows:

Indeed, [the American dream] not only focuses on individual agency, it insists that agency is all that matters in the end. Thus [it] is joyously liberating in its message that people may aspire to control their own destiny rather than merely acquiesce in the vagaries of fate or an overlord. But it deceives as well as liberates when it teaches that people do control their own destiny rather than helping them to recognize limits that have nothing to do with their own abilities or desires. (252-53; emphasis in original)

It is these limits unrelated to abilities and desires that Freddie fails—or refuses—to consider.

The life trajectory of the narrator’s Aunt Bernie serves as the antithesis to Freddie’s up-by-the-boot-straps ideology. If those who work hard and are virtuous are destined, according to the American dream, for success, Bernie should be most successful. As the moral center of the story (at least before she dies and comes back to life), Bernie is completely selfless and self-sacrificing, having devoted her life to caring for others (first her father and now her nieces,

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nephew, and grand-nephews); she remains positive and grateful in the face of misfortune—often comedically so; 8 and, above all else, she has a relentless work ethic. The narrator summarizes the life of his aunt, monologuing, “My feeling is, Bernie, I love you, but where are you? You work at DrugTown for minimum. You’re sixty and own nothing. You were basically a slave to your father and never had a date in your life” (98). Despite Bernie’s hard work, she was first demoted from Cashier to Greeter at DrugTown and then scared to death in her own home during a break-in. Through the character of Bernie, the text suggests that one’s economic status is not determined by one’s moral virtue or work ethic but by one’s family background, the state of market and capitalist forces, and mere happenstance.

Bernie, rather than feeling bitter that she is not receiving her just desserts, graciously accepts the subpar conditions in which she is living. The narrator intones, “When I say Sea Oak’s a pit she says she’s just glad to have a roof over her head” (95). Bernie takes a “meek shall inherit the earth” approach, believing she will be rewarded in the afterlife for her dedication and refusal to complain. As Rando explains, “Bernie’s patience and gratitude” is satirized by Saunders “in order to show how cultural ideologies help to reconcile characters to their class positions” (442-43). The paradox of the American dream is that it champions a belief that anyone can and should work hard to achieve financial success (as is espoused by the character Freddie), while also operating within a capitalist system that requires a segment of the population (the Bernies of the world) to be unsuccessful. Hochschild articulates this paradox thusly:

Capitalist markets require some firms to fail; . . . status hierarchies must have a bottom in order to have a top. But the optimistic language of and methodological individualism built into the American dream necessarily deceive people about these societal operations. . . . [O]ur basic institutions are designed to ensure that some fail, at least relatively, and the dream does nothing to help Americans cope with or even to recognize that fact. (37)

While alive, Bernie frequently made use of the very same optimistic language that worked to deceive her into acquiescence, continuously exhorting her relatives to be thankful: “‘I mean, complain if you want,’ she says. ‘But I think we’re doing pretty darn good for ourselves’” (98). However, Bernie’s character is radically altered by her experience of dying. She comes back from the dead undeceived, seeking the experiences—especially sexual ones—she never had while alive because, as she came to find out, the grave “sucks so bad” (115).

8. For instance, after a shooting at their apartment complex, during which a bullet hits the duck-shaped walker of one of the babies and does damage to its beak, Bernie’s response is to say, ‘“I think that looks even more like a real duck now. Because sometimes their beaks are cracked? I seen one like that downtown’” (98).

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Correspondingly, her new disillusioned philosophy on life is that unless you are a genius or have a trust fund, you have to “show your cock” to get ahead (122).

As mentioned in this article’s introduction, the American dream is a particularly male fantasy—specifically, a white male fantasy. Hochschild notes that the first tenet of the American dream—that anyone regardless of background or identity may achieve success—is largely false: “for most of American history, women of any race and men who were Native American, Asian, black or poor were barred from all but a narrow range of ‘electable futures’” (26). The idea that anyone can be or do anything they choose would be laughable to, say, a black man in antebellum America or a white woman in the nineteenth century. As Hochschild reminds us, “Ascriptive constraints have arguably been weakened over time, but until recently no more than about a third of the population was able to take seriously the first premise of the American dream” (26). It makes sense, then, that fiction working to critique the ideology of the American dream, in which characters are satirized for their belief in a just world that rewards people for hard work and virtue, would feature so many white men. Saunders, like Hochschild, seems to suggest that white men are the only demographic who may still be disabused of their notions regarding self-determination and the American dream since they are the only ones who held such notions in the first place.

Historically, success within the American capitalist system has not only been seen as a marker of one’s virtue but also of one’s masculinity. Armengol argues that “[a]s the historical product of the rise of industrialization and capitalism in the early nineteenth century, the self-made man was designed from the beginning to adopt social mobility and economic success as fundamental markers of masculinity” (25). David D. Gilmore makes a similar argument, writing, “wealth or position means creative and manipulative power, and this power signals masculinity” (110); work, according to Gilmore, defines manhood (110). As Armengol explains, “the compulsion to prove masculinity through accumulated wealth and social status has remained a central component of American culture from the eighteenth century to our day” (25). The failure to achieve wealth and material success, then, is often perceived as a failure to perform masculinity.

This connection between economic success and masculinity is prevalent in many of Saunders’s stories. Repeatedly, it is Saunders’s male characters rather than his female characters who feel the obligation to support their families and who carry the shame when they are unable to make ends meet, aligning with Gilmore’s observation that in most societies, it is men who experience “a hovering threat that separates them from women and boys” (223) when it comes to fulfilling economic expectations. For instance, the male narrator of “Sea Oak” believes it is his duty to support his sister, cousin, and their sons: “If I had my way,” he says, “I’d move everybody up to Canada” (97). He does not wish for Min and Jade to become self-sufficient and less dependent

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on him but instead wishes he had the capital to move them somewhere safer. He repeats this wish again after Bernie dies: “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when it happened . . . and sorry I wasn’t rich enough to move you somewhere safe” (100). Interestingly, the narrator does not blame the intruders who broke into the apartment and scared his aunt to death—perhaps he understands that they too had been disenfranchised to the point of seeking desperate measures. The narrator of “CivilWarLand” feels a similar obligation to provide for his family, lamenting, “Is this the life I envisioned for myself? My God no. I wanted to be a high jumper. But I have two of the sweetest children ever born” (9). The narrator of “Pastoralia” must also work a demanding and demeaning job (in his case as a real-life caveman in a theme park) to support his children—one of whom is sick—and his wife. While his wife ostensibly works hard to care for their children at home, it is the narrator who must “keep the money coming in” (35). The narrator of “The Semplica Girl Diaries” articulates this feeling of paternal obligation bluntly: “dad must do what dad must do” (162). In these stories, Saunders presents rather traditional family structures in which the father fulfills (or fails to fulfill) the role of breadwinner, yet considering the satirical nature of his fiction, this is, of course, not an endorsement of traditional values but a critique of the pressures put on men in such an economic and cultural system.

Saunders’s female characters, namely the wives of his narrators and protagonists, do not bear the brunt of economic misfortune or the obligation to support their families to the same extent. Instead the female characters often upbraid the protagonists for their failure to move their families along the path of upward mobility. In “The Wavemaker Falters,” the narrator’s wife Simone asks whether he worked on his resume over lunch; when he tells her he did not have time, she condescendingly responds, “Fine, . . . make waves the rest of your life” (38), despite the fact that she works at the same waterpark. In “CivilWarLand,” the narrator’s wife calls him a “bootlicker” for attending his boss’s whittling workshop. He then narrates, “I told her she’d better bear in mind which side of the bread her butter was on. She said whichever side it was on it wasn’t enough to shake a stick at. She’s always denigrating my paystub” (5). 9 The onus is not on her to provide the butter for the bread, so to speak, but on him. Similarly, in the story “Christmas,” the narrator discusses losing his spouse due to his “pathetically dwindling prospects” (89). In other stories, the wives simply leave their husbands. In “Isabelle,” it is Isabelle’s father, nicknamed Split Lip, who devotes his life to caring for his disabled daughter as “Mrs. Split Lip was long

9. It does seem too much of a stretch to read this line—and its use of the word “paystub” rather than “paycheck” or “salary”—as a subtle attack on the narrator’s masculinity in the form of a double-entendre: the narrator’s wife seems to be simultaneously critiquing his salary as well as implying he has a small penis. Later in the article, I discuss how failing to achieve economic success is a form of emasculation for many of Saunders’s male protagonists.

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gone, unable to bear the work Boneless required” (27). In “CivilWarLand,” the narrator’s wife also leaves, her farewell note reading, “I could never forgive you for putting our sons at risk. Goodbye forever, you passive flake” (23). The Wavemaker’s wife Simone does not leave him as such, but she does have an affair with their mutual boss, Leon, whose boldness and self-confidence Simone admires (37). In summation, if the men in Saunders’s stories fail to provide economically or appear passive or weak, they stand to lose their spouses—women who believe it is the man’s job to support the family.

While the above male protagonists might be understood as disillusioned with regard to the promises of the American dream, the idea that a white man can—and indeed will—achieve success in America is believed in fervently by the narrator of “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” Despite the fact that he and his wife are deep in credit card debt and without any prospects that would inspire such a belief, he has unshakeable faith that it is only a matter of time before he becomes rich. The narrator closes his diary entry dated “Sept. 6” by calling his work “stupid” and admitting he is “so tired of work” (118). In his next entry, dated “Sept. 7,” he recants: “Am not tired of work. It is a privilege to work. I do not hate the rich. I aspire to be rich myself” (118). Indoctrinated into the culture of the American dream, the narrator, though he is clearly frustrated with his job, feels he must value his work, because according to the mythos, it is hard work that will eventually lead to financial success. If he denigrates his work, he might be perceived as lacking a strong work ethic or might be accused of not trying hard enough, which would then mean he deserves his current station in life. 10 The very next sentence of the narrator’s diary reads, “And when we finally do get our own bridge, trout, treehouse, SGs, etc., at least will know we really earned them” (118-19, emphasis added). For the narrator, it is not a matter of if he will ever attain such things but when. Earlier in the story the narrator uses the word “when” in a similar fashion, wondering, “When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on hay-bale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps?” (112). His confidence in his own future wealth is apparent: “Have a feeling and have always had a feeling that this and other good things will happen for us!” (113). Being a white, middle-class, heterosexual man in America, he has no reason to believe he will not one day attain success (which for him equates to economic wealth and material possessions), and he admits to having felt this way from an early age. His belief in his individual exceptionalism is articulated in his admission that he “forgot former feeling of special destiny [he] used to have when tiny, . . . feeling [he] would someday do something great” (140). Though he comes from a working-class family and does not possess any remarkable skills or talents, he

10. The idea of work in the fiction of Saunders is inseparable from morality for “[w]ork carries moral and ethical freight, a claim made clear by the slippage in its very definitions” (Jansen and Adams).

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has believed from childhood for no particular reason that he was destined for greatness. As Moore explains, “the narrator bolsters imagery of an exceptional America, where class background is no obstacle, and critical dissent is merely the whining of self-made failures in a fair and generous system” (62).

Ironically, the narrator does attain moderate wealth (in the form of ten thousand dollars), but it has nothing to do with virtue or hard work—he simply wins the money via a lottery scratch ticket. The fact that his windfall is only a chance event, however, is lost on him. He does not, for instance, reflect back on his claim that when he finally obtained the economic success after which he is striving, he would at least know that he had earned it. As has been discussed, within the ideology of the American dream, all success is attributed to individual hard work and moral virtue. Correspondingly, the narrator seems to view his mere luck in winning the lottery as an affirmation of his work ethic and moral character. He asks, “What did we do to deserve?” and answers his question by saying, “In part, yes: luck. . . . But as saying goes, luck = ninety percent skill” (138). He then commends himself for using the winnings responsibly and not buying a boat or drugs or becoming cocky (139). Winning the lottery does not inspire the realization that for some wealth is a mere matter of chance; instead it only confirms for the narrator that the mythos of the American dream is true: he writes that he wants the future readers of his diary to know that “[i]n America of my time . . . anything possible!” (129). As Hochschild argues, “[f]or those afloat, the ideology of the American dream is a vindication, a goad to further efforts, a cause for celebration” (38). When those who believe in the American dream achieve success, whether through hard work or simple chance, they subsequently become more entrenched in the ideology, and as a result, they are even more likely to see those suffering as deserving of their position and are less likely to empathize or to offer any form of assistance.

Tellingly, the narrator does not view the future of the Semplica Girls (SGs) in the same way he views his own future. Being both non-male and primarily non-white, the American dream’s first tenet that anyone can achieve anything is not applicable to these young women from developing nations. After discovering that the SGs have escaped from his yard, the narrator is baffled about why they might have wanted to leave. He asks the police why they would do that, protesting, “They chose to be here” (152). The cop laughs and cuts him off, answering, “Smelling that American dream, baby” (152). However, despite smelling the American dream himself, the narrator cannot understand the Semplica Girls’ bid for freedom and upward mobility. He believes the Semplica Girls—being from poor, developing nations—should have been content with their lot in life, writing in his diary, “Why would she ruin it all, leave our yard? Could have had nice long run w/ us. What in the world was she seeking? What could she want so much, that would make her pull such desperate stunt?” (167). The narrator—despite spending the entire

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story seeking and desiring what his neighbors have and ultimately making the decision to spend the entirety of his lottery winnings on a birthday party for his daughter (a desperate stunt indeed)—cannot understand why a woman from a country like the Philippines or Moldova would want to be anything more than a living lawn ornament. As Noam Chomsky puts it, in order to retain a belief in the American dream, “[y]ou’d need to overlook the fact that you’re getting a richer, freer life by virtue of decimating the indigenous population, . . . massive slavery of another segment of the society, . . . bitterly exploited labor, overseas conquests, and so on” (6). 11

If economic success and social mobility are associated with masculinity, then the failure to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps is, according to the ideology of the American dream, a reason to feel emasculated. In Saunders’s fiction, the failure to achieve success within competitive, late-capitalist America is repeatedly viewed as a direct affront to the characters’ manhood. In “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” the narrator is asked to research who among the staff might be willing to “fight fire with fire” (5) when it comes to the teen gangs who are sneaking into and wreaking havoc on the theme park, and he settles on Ned Quinn, a character who is seemingly failing when it comes to the American dream: “Quinn’s dirt-poor with six kids” (7) and a “failed actor” (6). Quinn is called upon to start carrying actual ammo and shoot at the feet of any intruders to the park. Though Quinn feels such a role would compromise his personal ethics, he is, as the park owner Mr. A 12 describes him, “between a rock and hard place” (7). However, Quinn’s failure to succeed within the system of late capitalism is equated to his failure to assert his manhood—as “manhood” is perceived by someone like Mr. A who later calls Quinn “a milquetoast” (9). Soon after hiring Quinn to take on the gangs, the narrator hears gunshots and runs out to see “Quinn and a few of his men tied to the cannon. The gang guys took Quinn’s pants and put some tiny notches in his penis with their knives” (9). The gang’s direct mutilation of Quinn’s physical manhood implies they do not respect his symbolic manhood—that they do not see him as a “real man.” Quinn’s failure to raise his family out of poverty is linked to his inability to protect the park from the gangs or to keep both his metaphoric and literal manhood intact.

Also emasculated is another down-and-out character from Saunders’s fiction: Jeffrey, the narrator of “The 400-Pound CEO.” While Jeffrey is not exactly struggling to make ends meet, he is working in a dead-end job as a

11. See Nalerio’s article for a discussion of how the Semplica Girls tethered together with a wire through their temples evoke America’s history of slavery through chain-gang imagery.12. Interestingly, Mr. A is characterized as a “self-made man” by the narrator (4). In contrast to Saunders’s protagonists, many of the men for whom these protagonists work are hyper-masculine, ultra-confident, and often violent misogynists. While the narratives of Horatio Alger present the path to success as lined in honest and virtuous deeds, the narratives of Saunders suggest that the path to success often contains dishonesty and violence.

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raccoon exterminator and mentions his “pitiful savings” (50), which he decimates buying gifts for his love interest’s son. He, like so many of the other underemployed male characters in Saunders’s fiction, feels “life should offer more than this” (48), and, as is ubiquitous in Saunders’s work, Jeffrey is both a character struggling to succeed financially and also struggling to perceive himself as a man. Early in the story, Jeffrey narrates his own feelings of emasculation, admitting he feels he is too large to attract women (46) and that he has decided to be “sexless” (47). Jeffrey is further feminized by those with whom he works: when his coworker Claude makes a cruel comment about his overweight body, their boss Tim—who serves as the sex-driven, misogynistic foil to Jeffrey’s good-natured sexlessness—asks Claude whether he made such an observation “after having wild sex with [Jeffrey] all night” (46). After Jeffrey kills Tim, he forges a note to make it seem as though Tim has gone off on a spiritual journey and left Jeffrey in charge; the note reads, “I see now that [Jeffrey] is a man of considerable gifts” (60; emphasis added). Jeffrey’s cover-up, however, is soon unveiled, and he is sentenced to fifty years in prison, where he is emasculated quite literally. From prison, Jeffrey intones, “So now I know misery. . . . I know the body odor of Vic, a Chicago kingpin who’s claimed me for his own and compels me to wear a feminine hat with fruit on the brim for nightly interludes” (63). Among the punishments for Jeffrey’s failure to hold onto his new socioeconomic position as CEO is feminization.

Perhaps, though, no character’s masculinity is as flagrantly on display as that of the narrator of “Sea Oak,” who makes a living as a nearly naked “Pilot,” waiting on tables of women of a higher social class and performing acts like mud-wrestling his male coworkers or feeding the customers chicken wings out of his hand. He is routinely demeaned by the female patrons who also get to vote on his level of attractiveness and in effect have the power to terminate his employment. For instance, the day after the narrator discovers his deceased aunt’s grave has been defaced and his aunt’s body has gone missing, he returns to work despite not feeling up for it and is asked by a patron to pick up a dollar she dropped on the ground. When he picks it up, she admonishes him: “‘Not like that, not like that. . . . Face the other way, so when you bend we can see your crack’” (110). When he refuses to perform as she has asked and gives back the dollar, he is voted “Stinker,” which has the potential to affect the future of his employment—near the beginning of the story, Lloyd Betts is fired for being consistently rated a “Stinker.” One stipulation of the job is that the “Pilots” are not allowed to show the patrons their real penises and instead wear oversized Penile Simulators that the women grope, saying they will “never be able to look their boyfriends’ meager genitalia in the eye again” (99). However, because these are oversized replicas—implying their real penises are not of a sufficient size—the effect is, as Rando notes, castrating: “Saunders envisions a form of labor that emasculates the worker through the very performance of his ostensibly masculine work. When men have no institutional or class-privileged

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means of leveraging power, all that is left to them may be exaggerated masculine sexuality” (445). This is made apparent by Bernie 2.0 and her constant appeals to the narrator to “show his cock.” Dying has bestowed upon Bernie both psychic abilities and a newfound, realistic understanding of the way capitalist America works; however, despite her new “powers,” the only advice she can offer that will improve her nephew’s economic position is for him to show his penis to women who are willing to pay.

Exaggerated masculine sexuality, however, is not the only means of leveraging power for Saunders’s characters. As with many of Saunders’s stories, “Isabelle” is about a seemingly benevolent and devoted father 13—referred to as “Split Lip” by the narrator. Isabelle, the title character, is physically disabled and thus monikered “Boneless” by the young, ignorant kids of the neighborhood, a group to which the narrator (also male) belongs. The story opens with a touching description of Split Lip: the narrator confesses, “[t]he first great act of love I ever witnessed was Split Lip bathing his handicapped daughter” (27). Split Lip is employed as a police officer, but the narrator explains that “[m]aintaining Boneless cost plenty” (28). In addition to police work, Split Lip had a second job selling air purifiers, but the business has since folded, and so when Split Lip goes to work, he leaves his daughter “on the floor with a water bottle and her lunch and a picture book” (28). Split Lip blames his current situation not on the broken capitalist system in which he works while still being unable to adequately provide for his daughter, nor on his country’s inadequate healthcare system that does not provide the treatment his daughter needs at a price he can afford, but on the fact that his neighborhood has become more racially diverse, arguing that black people were not willing to buy his air purifiers (though as the narrator tells us, the air purifiers were a scam). While the story makes it clear that the entire city—and possibly country—is in a recession, Split Lip does not blame “market forces at work” (28) but an influx of people of color in his community. What Saunders dramatizes in this story is historicized in Kimmel’s Manhood in America. Kimmel writes, “Just as in the past, the turn of the twenty-first century found American men increasingly anxious; men feel their ability to prove manhood threatened by industrialization and deindustrialization, immigration, and a perceived invasion” (217). It is obvious that Split Lip feels his neighborhood has been invaded, and he responds with anger and, ultimately, violence. According to Kimmel, American men are not only anxious but angry, “[a]nd specifically, it is those American men—white, native-born, middle and lower-middle class— . . . who have become the angriest” (217). Split Lip’s anger culminates in a disturbing scene of police brutality: the narrator recounts Split Lip dragging a black teen into a clearing by the lagoon; unprovoked, he then pushes the teen

13. The related topic of fatherhood in the work of Saunders is beyond the scope of this article but remains another area that deserves critical attention.

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under water until he drowns while his younger brother watches. While this might seem out of character for a man who is in the first two pages of the story described as a caring father, when we consider the forces at work regarding capitalism and masculinity, the violence is not inexplicable; according to Armengol, “male violence does not always occur when men feel most powerful, but often when they feel relatively powerless” (117). Split Lip, feeling powerless and emasculated by his failure to adequately care for his daughter and his wife’s abandonment, seeks revenge on someone he feels represents those who are to blame for his loss of power. As Kimmel explains, “when men fail, they are humiliated, with nowhere to place their anger. Some are looking for answers; others want payback” (Manhood 221).

This idea of men desiring payback for perceived emasculation reaches its apotheosis in Saunders’s story “Adams,” one of the more disturbing stories in his oeuvre. It opens with the narrator, Roger, explaining that he has never liked his neighbor Frank Adams and then one day Adams is “standing in [Roger’s] kitchen, in his underwear. Facing in the direction of [his] kids’ room!” (101). Finding Adams in his home partially undressed and facing his children’s room is interpreted by the narrator as a challenge to his role as man of the house and protector of his family and a violation for which there must be payback: Roger narrates, “Guy comes in in his shorts and I’m sitting here taking this? This is love? Love for my kids?” (101). Roger refuses to sit there and take it or to involve the police. Instead he decides that the proper course of action is to enact physical violence on the potential pedophile in the form of “wonks”—the narrator’s term “wonk” eliding the significant violence he does to Adams. We see, for instance, that when Roger first “wonks” Adams, it is a blow hard enough that “down he goes” (101); the second “wonk” also causes Adams to go down (102), and in order to “wonk” him a third time, the narrator shoves Adams’s wife out of the way. For Roger, the blows he delivers Adams and his family are justified and deserved: Adams entering his house and posing a threat to his children right under his nose suggests to Roger that his neighbor does not acknowledge his ability to protect his family—what, for him, equates to Adams not acknowledging his manhood. Tellingly, it is Roger and not his wife who believes he has “to be cautious and protect [his] family or their blood will be on [his] hands” (105).

Ben Knights observes that “[o]ne recurrent motif of the masculine narrative is the desire to anticipate the vengeance of the universe by a pre-emptive strike” (128), and we see that Roger, in anticipation of what Adams might do to his children, preemptively disarms him, going into his home when the family is out to gather up Adams’s rifle, steak knives, butter knives, knife sharpener, letter openers, and paperweight (since, Roger reasons, he would definitely use the paperweight himself to “bash” in the head of his enemy if he found his own guns and knives taken). Roger does not stop there, however; he next envisions what he would do if he discovered himself similarly disarmed

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and concludes, “What I would do is look around my house in a frenzy for something else dangerous . . . such as household chemicals, and then either ring the house of my enemy with the toxics and set them on fire, or pour some into the pool of my enemy” (105). The story ends with the Adams family finding Roger in their basement collecting their household chemicals in a garbage bag. With the family attacking him, Roger takes out his lighter and sets fire to the bag of toxins before making “for the light at the top of the stairs, where [he] knew the door was, and the night was, and [his] freedom, and [his] home” (106). The incredibly disproportionate retribution he enacts on Adams (the ostensible killing of the entire Adams family) restores for Roger his sense of freedom and home: the threat to his manhood has been mitigated and his home (both his literal house and his larger home of America, and with it the American patriarchal way of life) is no longer under attack.

What Saunders calls attention to in this story—as well as in several others—is the dangerous slippage that often occurs within the framework of the American dream: in a system that promises citizens—white men in particular—economic rewards, stability, and power, it is easy for men to slip—in their own minds—from the role of perpetrator into that of victim when they have not acquired what they feel they are owed. Roger can see himself as a hero restoring justice, a man doing his duty to protect his children, while enacting physical violence on (and likely killing) Adams’s wife and children. Split Lip can see himself as a victim of inequality despite his brutal and racist killing of an innocent teenager. The narrator of “The Semplica Girl Diaries” can see his own socioeconomic position as unfair while at the same time owning human slaves from developing nations who are forced to live strung together as his living lawn ornaments. What I have attempted to demonstrate in this article is Saunders’s fiction’s awareness and critique of the ways that the mythos of the American dream is inexorably linked to traditional constructions of masculinity—white masculinity in particular. Saunders’s fiction calls for a reevaluation and subsequent abandoning of the American dream not only because it is a false dream that more often than not fails to deliver but, more importantly, because when it does fail, those who feel most entitled (namely white, heterosexual men) may be incited to seek retribution, to violently tip the scales back in their favor. As Knights points out—and Saunders’s fiction dramatizes—“justice can be obtained by making sure someone is made to compensate for the protagonist’s own sense of being wrong” (128).

Hollie Adams University of Maine

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WORKS CITED

Armengol, Josep M. Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Print.

Basseler, Michael. “Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction.” Critical Essays on George Saunders. Eds. Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 153-71. Print.

Beecher, Henry Ward. Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects. Boston: Jewett, 1853. Print.

Chomsky, Noam. Requiem for the American Dream. New York: Seven Stories P, 2017. Print.

Gilmore, David D. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Print.

Hochschild, Jennifer L. Facing up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. Print.

Huebert, David. “Biopolitical Dystopias, Bureaucratic Carnivores, Synthetic Primitives: ‘Pastoralia’ as Human Zoo.” Critical Essays on George Saunders. Eds. Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 105-20. Print.

Jansen, Brian and Hollie Adams. “Good Work and Good Works: Work and the Postsecular in George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” European Journal of American Studies 13.2 (2018): n. pag. Web. 28 Oct. 2020.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Books of the Times; The Losses, Delusions and Terrors of the Lonely.” The New York Times 2 Feb. 1996. Web. 28 Oct. 2020.

Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Ed. David Haring. Los Angeles: Sideshow, 2010. 131-46. Print.

---. “Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity.” Critical Essays on George Saunders. Eds. Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 41-58. Print.

Kimmel, Michael. The Gendered Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

---. Manhood in America. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

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Knights, Ben. Writing Masculinities: Male Narratives in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Print.

Millen, Alex. “Affective Fictions: George Saunders and the Wonderful-Sounding Words of Neoliberalism.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59.2 (2018): 127-41. Print.

Moore, Gillian Elizabeth, “‘Hope that, in Future, All Is well’: American Exceptionalism and Hopes for Resistance in Two Stories by George Saunders.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59.2 (2018): 59-75. Print.

Nalerio, Juliana. “The Patriarch’s Ball: Class Consciousness, Violence, and Dystopia in George Saunders’ Vision of Contemporary America.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 52 (2015): 89-102. Print.

Neeper, Layne. “‘To Soften the Heart’: George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy.” Studies in American Humor 2.2 (2016): 280-99. Print.

Pogell, Sarah. “‘The Verisimilitude Inspector’: George Saunders as the New Baudrillard.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52.4 (2011): 460-78. Print.

Rando, David P. “George Saunders and the Postmodern Working Class.” Contemporary Literature 53.3 (2012): 437-60. Print.

Saunders, George. “Adams.” In Persuasion Nation. New York: Riverhead, 2006. 101-08. Print.

---. “Christmas.” In Persuasion Nation. New York: Riverhead, 2006. 89-100. Print.

---. “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. 1996. New York: Riverhead, 1997. 3-26. Print.

---. “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror.” CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. 1996. New York: Riverhead, 1997. 78-87. Print.

---. “Isabelle.” CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. 1996. New York: Riverhead, 1997. 27-33. Print.

---. “My Amendment.” In Persuasion Nation. New York: Riverhead, 2006. 65-72. Print.

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---. “My Flamboyant Grandson.” In Persuasion Nation. New York: Riverhead, 2006. 13-22. Print.

---. “Pastoralia.” Pastoralia. New York: Riverhead, 2000. 1-68. Print.

---. “Puppy.” Tenth of December. New York: Random House, 2013. 31-43. Print.

---. “Sea Oak.” Pastoralia. New York: Riverhead, 2000. 91-126. Print.

---. “The 400-Pound CEO.” CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. 1996. New York: Riverhead, 1997. 45-64. Print.

---. “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” Tenth of December. New York: Random House, 2013. 109-67. Print.

---. “The Wavemaker Falters.” CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. 1996. New York: Riverhead, 1997. 34-44. Print.

---. “Victory Lap.” Tenth of December. New York: Random House, 2013. 3-27. Print.

---. “Winky.” Pastoralia. New York: Riverhead, 2000. 69-90. Print.

Cet article a pour objet de démontrer que la préoccupation de Saunders pour la masculinité blanche est un élément clé et négligé de son projet satirique qui peut être associé à sa critique du rêve américain. La fiction de Saunders articule une vérité fondamentale du rêve américain qui est, et a été historiquement, un rêve pour les hommes, en particulier ceux qui s’identifient comme étant blancs. En outre, la fiction de Saunders attire l’attention sur les ramifications auxquelles est confrontée une société qui continue à croire en la promesse du mythe. Saunders montre comment ceux qui travaillent dur et se pensent vertueux, même s’ils ne parviennent toujours pas à se hisser à la hauteur et à obtenir une mobilité ascendante, peuvent avoir le sentiment que leur virilité est remise en question et, par conséquent, être convaincus de la nécessité de réaffirmer leur masculinité sous forme de violence physique.

THERE ARE DARKER KINGDOMS: MAPPING MODERNITY IN KEVIN BARRY’S

SHORT STORIES

In assessing the state of Irish writing in 2010, the writer Paul Murray offered the following reflection on the ways in which Irish novelists were responding to the contemporary moment:

It is disappointing when you read a young novelist who seems to make no effort at all to engage with modernity. And it does happen. . . . On the one hand I do believe authors should write what they want, on the other it is slightly disingenuous to ignore modernity, and it seems there is a danger that the Irish novel could become this nostalgic form where readers go to get images of priests and donkeys and so on. (qtd. in Flood)

There are of course novels—such as Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow (2007), Mike McCormack’s Notes from a Coma (2005), and Ann Haverty’s The Free and Easy (2007)—that confound such analysis, and in the years subsequent to the remarks made by Murray, a plethora of Irish novels have been published by a generation of Irish writers who appear deeply engaged with Ireland and the contemporary. 1 However, Murray’s concerns about

1. See for example Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins (2010), Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011), Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012), Tana French’s Broken Harbour (2012), Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015), Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016), and Conor O’Callaghan’s Nothing on Earth (2016).

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the future of the Irish novel were neither isolated nor wildly contrarian at the time, and his evaluation of the genre aligned with a larger sense that Irish literary culture had demurred somewhat from interrogating or even depicting modern Ireland and the modernising forces at play in Irish society. His remarks spoke to the notion that Irish writers were “still writing about past history, portraying Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s, while the big Celtic Tiger novel was nowhere in view” (Mianowski 1).

What is striking in accounts that construe Irish literary culture as inattentive to the Celtic Tiger during this period is the tendency to focus on the novel as the site at which writerly engagement with the contemporary can be gauged. This has perhaps obscured analysis of how the writers’ capacity to take account of modernity is not simply a question of intent, or “effort,” but is also deeply connected to the aesthetic opportunities afforded by the genre within which they choose to express their vision. In this regard, the short story, for reasons outlined below, has generally proved more expeditious than the novel in attuning fiction to the fluctuating frequencies of the modern Irish zeitgeist. Kevin Barry’s two collections of short stories There are Little Kingdoms (2007) and Dark Lies the Island (2011) are exemplary of the agility and elasticity that the genre has displayed in responding to Ireland’s changing socio-economic dispensation in recent decades. Barry’s work confirms Heather Ingman’s observation that the “connection between the short story and modernity was never so evident as in [the] closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the twenty-first” (226). Engaging with modernity, of course, implies more than simply reflecting the contemporary moment, and Barry exploits the formal opportunities afforded by the short story form to explore the complex causes and contexts of modernisation in Ireland while also interrogating modernity in a wide array of its possible manifestations and meanings, especially: as an anti-traditional phase of Irish social transformation characterised by cultural liberalisation; as a systemic economic recalibration geared to neoliberalism and the logics of the international marketplace; as an acceleration of technological change, urbanisation and globalisation; and (especially germane to Ireland) as a concomitant of colonisation and a threat to indigenous culture. 2

2. As the above list suggests, this article engages with conceptualisations of modernity that construe it primarily as a socio-cultural, technological and economic phenomenon instiga-ting epochal change. There is not space here to delineate the full range and complexity of the term’s possible meanings within Irish culture, however the argument is grounded in Joe Cleary’s sophisticated and lucid account of modernity and Ireland in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture.

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In delineating the differences between the short story and the novel, Declan Kiberd has argued that “without the concept of a normal society, the novel is impossible, but the short story is particularly appropriate to a society in which revolutionary upheavals have shattered the very idea of normality” (43-44). In this analysis, which strongly echoes Frank O’Connor’s argument in The Lonely Voice (1962), the novel usually requires the creation of a socially extensive and more comprehensively explored diegetic world; an undertaking that is more complex and artistically perilous when rendering a society moving through precipitous change. Because it is less encumbered by the need to depict an enlarged social world, the short story is patently more amenable to the portrayal of rapid social metamorphosis and convulsion. As Ingman argues, in “an unstable and often confusing society, the short story is ideally framed to present momentary insights, its characteristic features of economy, tension and irony, making it particularly suited to the modern age” (227). The inherent aesthetic properties of the short story form, then, help to explain why Irish short stories written during the Celtic Tiger period proved especially alive to the fluctuating concerns and obsessions of contemporary Irish society and culture. Notable writers in this regard include Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Colm Tóibín, Joseph O’Connor, Evelyn Conlon, Hugo Hamilton, Roddy Doyle, Claire Keegan, Julian Gough and Gerard Donovan. 3 Indeed, Joseph O’Connor singled out Donovan for particular praise in his review of his 2008 collection, Country of the Grand, arguing that: “This is not the first fiction about Ireland’s economic boom but it may well be the first to see it for what it truly was, in all its shimmering newness and garish strangeness—its ugliness somehow related to its beauty.” This analysis could well be applied to Barry’s two volumes of short fiction, which open a window into Ireland from both sides of the Great Financial Crisis, often casting a cold, exacting eye on the pretensions of national self-conception and gazing askance at the illusions engendered by increased affluence during this period.

There Are Little Kingdoms, Barry’s first published volume of short fiction, is a collection of thirteen stories largely set in Ireland in the

3. See for example Evelyn Conlon’s Telling (2000); Arrows in Flight: Short Stories from a New Ireland (2002), edited by Caroline Walsh; Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s Midwife to the Fairies (2003); New Dubliners (2005), edited by Oona Frawley; Best New Irish Short Stories 2004-05 (2005) and Best New Irish Short Stories 2006-07 (2007), both edited by David Marcus; Colm Tóibìn’s Mothers and Sons (2006); Philip O’Ceallaigh’s Notes from a Turkish Whore-house (2006); Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees (2007); Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields (2007); Gerard Donovan’s Country of the Grand (2008); Anne Enright’s Taking Pictures (2008).

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late nineties and early noughties, which focus on small-town life in the hinterlands of the nation’s boomtime society. The narrative gaze dwells on those at the penumbra or outer-orbit of the Celtic Tiger “miracle,” individuals who have been marginalised by Ireland’s burgeoning prosperity and buffeted by its turbulent wake—its effects are felt but often passively, tragically. These narratives peer behind what Evelyn Conlon describes as the “smokescreen” of the Celtic Tiger, to reveal “the poor mean lives that were still being lived on the terraces, despite the New Financial Centre, coloured mobile phones and exploding property prices” (212). In pursuing a form to accommodate the magnitude of this social-cultural change, Barry often intermixes a naturalist aesthetic—with its attendant notions of socio-environmental determinism and disenchanted existence—and a more mythical or fantastical mode that displays traces of the ontologically unmoored worlds conjured within an older Irish oral folk tradition. In “Last Days of the Buffalo,” these two forms are to the fore. The narrative takes place in the West of Ireland near the mountains of Co. Clare and focuses on a preternaturally large taxi driver named Foley who is revealed as maladapted to the emerging dispensation. The description of his previous seventeen-years’ employment at the nearby petrol station might be understood as a micro-parable of the more deleterious social effects engendered by the economic transformations occurring at this time. When Foley first began his employment, he “knew the customers by name: the boys from the cement plant, the Raheen businessmen, the odd few locals” and he would “talk controversial incidents in the small parallelogram the Sunday gone” (53). The relatively settled shape, rhythm and meaning of his working world, however, is fundamentally ruptured and disarticulated by the demands of commerce:

Statoil bought out Texaco and the kiosk was bulldozed. An air-conditioned, glass-fronted store went up, with automatic doors and cooler units. Foley found himself with colleagues. The next thing they were squeezing him into a uniform and sticking a bright red hat up top. Then they started fucking about with croissants. Then they put in a flower stall and started selling disposable underwater cameras—the better, presumably, to document the coral reefs of the Shannon. (53)

In this more rationalised, financially productive, affectively clinical non-place, Foley feels himself existentially adrift. In Bourdieusian terms, he is unable to reconcile his pre-existing habitus to the new nomos (or organising matrix) that underpins and structures the profoundly changed field of action at his workplace. Foley’s customary way of thinking, acting and being is challenged to such an extent that he eventually corners his

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supervisor and angrily demands to know: “‘What the fuck are we?’” (54). It is perhaps over-simplistic to construe Foley’s subsequent dismissal from his job as allegorical of the expurgation of older forms of Irish identity by a more profit-focused, maximally efficient, and corporatised Celtic Tiger culture. However, Foley’s experience of moving from a working life of more authentic, if limited, social interaction and knowledge to a seemingly incomprehensible, discomfiting simulacrum of working community does illuminate the changing forms of social organisation and employment practice during this period. It registers, too, a shift towards more vapid, hollowed out forms of communality and the drift towards what has been cogently termed “community without propinquity” (Scarbrough 69).

If Foley can be read as an image of Ireland’s disenfranchised underclass—of lives circumscribed and deleteriously determined by unprecedented social and economic tumult—he also functions as a symbolic vestige of an older folkloric belief and tradition that stands in opposition to the more materialist, rationalising culture now dominant. It becomes apparent as the story progresses that Foley can accurately predict the time and manner of other people’s death, a preternatural (or supernatural) ability that invokes the ancient seers of Irish Celtic mythology. While on a walk along a nearby creek, Foley encounters a group of young travellers who harass him for money. When the leader of the group forces the issue, Foley shakes his hand and, after a “cold quiver passes between them,” Foley tells the boy: “‘You were born the fourth son in a lay-by outside Tarbert . . . and you’ll die a wet afternoon in the coming May. The way I’m seeing it, a white van will go off the road at a T-junction’” (58). The young boy is sufficiently disturbed by the power of Foley’s intuition that the group eventually leave him alone, fearful of his psychic ability. In the final paragraph of the tale, Barry asks the reader to imagine their own encounter with Foley as though they were using his services as a taxi man: “You hand him the fare and he hands back the change and you feel the strange quiver, its coldness. He can tell precisely, in each case but his own” (61). In this denouement and in the narrator’s perspectival shift to a more direct, even accusatory address, there is a suggestion that the older folkloric modes and cultures that Foley appears to represent still have a pertinence that cannot be so easily dismissed. However, in an echo of the doomed buffalo of the story’s title, this tradition and mode of apprehension are in fact on the verge of extinction, their valency atrophying in the new order. In this sense the narrative brilliantly excavates larger cultural anxieties and sublimated fears regarding the cultural transformations wrought by Ireland’s recent modernisation, while also reflecting a fundamental conflict that is paradigmatic of the short story genre: the “tension between the Irish

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short story as a transmitter of tradition and its current position as the form that perhaps best expresses Irish modernity” (Ingman 10). These tensions are again evident in another story from the collection, “Animal Needs,” which again examines the less palatable underbelly of the Celtic Tiger as it manifests in small-town Ireland.

The narrative focuses on John Martin, a poultry farmer and priapic local lothario, as he awaits a farm inspection from the Organic Certification Board. There are shades of both Joyce’s Dubliners and Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger in Barry’s rendering of the dysfunctional cast of characters that populate the story. However, individual lives are characterised not so much by paralysis or repression, but rather a desolate futility born of excess. Barry’s finely polished looking glass offers a grim picture of an over-medicated society whose inhabitants’ lives constitute a banal routine of substance abuse, insipid consumerism and rampant, soullessly mechanical sexual behaviours. A disaffected younger generation punctuate their nights with near suicidal acts of thrill-seeking: “There are crisis levels of debt. There is alcoholism and garrulousness and depressive ideation. . . . There is addiction to prescription medications and catalogue shopping. Boys with pesticide eyes pull handbrake turns at four in the morning and scream the names of dark angels. Everybody is fucking everybody else” (36).

Alongside this scrupulously realist account of life on Ireland’s “midland plain,” the narrative is also shot through with more speculative metaphysical perspectives that link it to older folk traditions. When describing a particularly drab area of the town near Martin’s home, the narrator notes: “There are feelings strong enough to overwhelm the physical laws. There are feelings that can settle in stone. There is an age-old malaise in the vicinity of this terrace. It has soaked into the grain of the place. The afternoons looking out on sheeting rain. The nights staring into the dark infinities. . . . How would a place be right after it?” (40). Here the text posits a non-materialist (therefore non-naturalist) notion that immanent within the physical properties of certain spaces, lies an intractable residue of former being. This concept of place is underpinned by an almost Berkeleyan notion that the affective energies of multiple, varied moments of consciousness can somehow emanate into the substrate of the surrounding environment, shaping and determining how it is constituted and perceived. In this theory of world, matter is not ultimately governed by indifferent mechanical laws and forces, but rather is susceptible, and pervious, to human feeling, insight and affect. In Barry’s diegetic universe, place is not solely defined by its topography, geography or environment, but by its function as a reservoir of accreted collective memory in which the psychic history of a community can obtain, preserve and, often,

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haunt. This theory of place patently upends more rationalist perspectives of space associated with modernity and aligns with more supernatural, otherworldly strains of perception connected to Celtic myth (one thinks of the Early Irish Immrama, for example) and the Irish oral tradition. This dialectic between quotidian reality and spectral otherworldliness in Barry’s narrative is representative of the persistent dualities of perspective within the Irish short story more generally, which are linked to Ireland’s history as a colonised nation, and it again reveals the ways in which the Irish oral tradition can invigorate the structures of short fiction. 4

If “Animal Needs” and “Last days of the Buffalo” maintain a tension between the real and the unreal, or perhaps the credible and the incredible, “There are Little Kingdoms” depicts a more thoroughly uncanny and destabilised realm. The story is narrated by a Dubliner named “Fitzy” as he experiences an increasingly surreal and nightmarish journey through Dublin in the depths of winter. From the beginning, there is an unsettling tension between the narrator’s “reliably cheerful” attitude and the grim “pinched” urban landscape through which the “traffic groaned, sulked, convulsed itself” and “Motorists tamped down their dull fury as best they could” (119, 122). The narrator’s “pleasantly distanced” perspective and sanguine mood is ruptured when he looks at a laundrette and spies an old friend standing by the window who had died six years before in a car crash. On fleeing the spectre of his friend, the narrator seeks comfort by the waters of the Liffey, but notes both the “foul and forgotten” homeless drug addicts and the “Drab office workers in Dunnes suits” who “chomped baguettes” (120). The juxtaposition of the worker drones, the enervated commuters, and the homeless addicts all on various circuits throughout the city intimates how sections of Irish society have become part-zombified by unthinking forms of consumption and addiction; the motorists and office workers, in particular, are also suggestive of the manner in which urban places—roads, streets, walkways—have been re-structured and re-codified as solely commercialist spaces, circuits of transit bound by the logics of the new neoliberal order.

The narrator seems increasingly alienated by the streets he moves through and decides to take a “bus to the hills and to hide out for a while there, with gentle people” (121). However, every route to the bus station is blocked and he is eventually told by a “man in the uniform of the State” that there are “no buses in or out.” The officer, the narrator soon realises,

4. For further discussion of how the Irish oral tradition “shadows the written short story” and the ways in which Ireland’s colonial history shapes the evolution of the genre, see Ingman (260-61).

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is “Harry Carolan, a.k.a Harry Cakes, the bread-and-fancies man of my childhood” and he has been dead since 1983 (121). Soon after, another dead figure from his past appears, a childhood friend from the mid-west of Ireland who was struck and killed by lighting when fishing on the banks of the Shannon. Terrified by these spectres from his youth, the narrator takes comfort in Dublin’s Phoenix park where he becomes “highly emotional” at the sight of the park’s “tame deer” and the “glorious life” they imply (125). His fervid desire to escape into a romanticised rural idyll, combined with his witnessing of ghostly figures from his youth, suggest a deep yearning for the parochial and a nostalgia for an idealised past in which community and society were more coherent and comprehensible. Still, the past is anything but stable for the narrator, and the confusing interweaving and interpolation of different time periods in the narrative, combined with the anachronistic intermingling of historical figures (he is given a handbill for a Jim Larkin speech at one point), reflect the ways in which Irish history and culture were recycled, monetised, and commodified as part of Ireland’s commercial and touristic re-branding at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 5 In this regard, the story’s setting in the nation’s capital is particularly pertinent. As Coulter and Coleman observed of the city during this period: “It is difficult, at times, when walking around Dublin to shake the conviction that the entire city has been transformed into a cultural theme park for the entertainment and distraction of natives and visitors alike” (25). This theme as explored in the narrative accords with Fredric Jameson’s notion of the weakening of historicity and the erasure of historical depth concomitant with the cultural embrace of the logic of late capitalism—a process well under way at this juncture in Ireland’s modernisation.

At various points in the story, the narrator has trouble making reality legible or even knowable: he cannot read the text of menus in a café he visits; he is frequently uncertain of his emotional response to events; the fabric of space and time itself, which becomes distinctly non-Euclidean and non-linear, will not function as he expects; and he is not even entirely certain of his own mortality, wondering at one point if he is “in heaven or hell” (124). There are patent echoes here of the ontologically vertiginous world of the Third Policeman, as though translocated into the city; and just as in O’Brien’s text, there appears to be no way out of this psychologically discomfiting and epistemologically rebarbative (non-)reality. Unable to reach the past or comfortably exist within the present, the narrator appears to languish in a liminal space, evacuated from the

5. For further discussion, see Negra.

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contemporary as unnecessary, unproductive detritus. Defeated by the inner city, the only refuge for the narrator is a return to his “quiet, residential street in my quiet, residential suburb” (124). The comfort and security provided by his rented flat initially offer a balm to his existential anxiety and distress. His life there melds an enchanted, fairy-tale realm with a late capitalist world of incessant consumption: he has magically self-replenishing shelves, free utilities, and a tin in the kitchen that always contains just enough money to buy a “drinkable rioja” from the local off licence. This charmed yet strangely banal, muted existence renders a dark reflection of the behaviours and lifestyles adopted by an upwardly-mobile Dublin renter class that emerged during the Celtic Tiger.

However, the narrator’s relatively equanimous domestic situation is undercut by persistent phone calls made by speakers who are virtually incomprehensible, even though they speak in languages, dialects and accents that are recognisable. When he phones the Exchange (an “apparatus of the state”) to complain, he is faced with four dialling options, offering different services. The second option offers the possibility of topping up “your free-go, anywhere-anytime service” but the narrator does not possess a mobile phone—“those infernal contraptions”—and his fervent rejection of this new mode of communication bespeaks his inability to accommodate himself to the accelerated pace of technological change and the space-time compression that it engenders (128). By the time the narrator listens to option four on the phone, the narrative drifts into a more thoroughly Kafkaesque, even Beckettian mode: “If you seek an answer to the sense of vagueness that surrounds your existence like a fine mist, press four” (128). On choosing this option, the voice tells him to climb a ladder hidden in his back garden. He ascends the ladder and climbs, impossibly, above the clouds while hauling himself on top of a limestone cliff face overlooking a stretch of coastline that “may have been Howth or Bray, or one of these places” (129). He finds a telescope with its view locked on a “small circle of grey shingle” on the beach below into which a mysterious woman appears. The view is in “black and white, flickering, it was old footage, a silent movie,” and it becomes apparent that the woman exists in a time period now passed and that the narrator will have no hope of contacting her again (129).

Gregory Dekter, who reads this story through a “literary-cinematic framework,” argues that at this point in the narrative, the narrator “has lost any directorial authority he may have previously enjoyed, and can neither comprehend nor ignore, neither saturate nor rarefy, his visual surroundings.” Ultimately, he is “forced to confront the possibility that he too resides within a frame” (168). This reading accords well with the notion

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that the narrator’s existence is somehow controlled, organised and directed by the inscrutable, enigmatic bureaucracy linked to the “Exchange,” and that, à la The Third Policeman, he must follow a pre-scripted and possibly infinitely repeating, purgatorial daily journey culminating in a fleeting realisation of his own lack of agency and his subjection to a circumscribing narrative frame. Given the story’s contemporary Irish mise-en-scène and milieu (the enervated Dublin commuters, shoppers and office workers), these metafictional and metaleptic components intimate the subtle ways in which capitalist meta-discourses and systems of understanding came to govern the behaviours and attitudes of those who became fully assimilated into Celtic Tiger culture. The narrator’s ascent to the unreal cliffs also marks the most extreme point of the temporal and spatial distortion that has increasingly characterised his reality. Aside from their darkly comic effects, these spatio-temporal convulsions seem to figure the ways in which space and time have become increasingly decoupled within Ireland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This increasing “time-space distanciation” is a function of Ireland’s accelerated modernisation and, as Giddens argues, results in disembedding mechanisms that “‘lift out’ social activity from localised contexts, reorganising social relations across large time-space distances” (53). The narrator is alienated, atomised and mystified by such processes, and the subjective world that he communicates to the reader offers an aperture into the struggle many faced in Ireland to internalise and come to terms with the vast changes to the social milieu that occurred at this juncture.

Dark Lies the Island, Barry’s second volume operates at times as a kind of diptych to There are Little Kingdoms—the reader re-visits similar territories but they are often more explicitly transformed by the modernising effects of the Celtic Tiger. This is particularly apparent in terms of changes in sexual behaviours, new class forces, and the ever expanding range of commodities available to the consumer. The Great Financial Crisis (which occurred when Barry was writing many of these tales) seems to linger over a number of stories, even if it is not broached directly. The volume begins with “Across the Rooftops,” a very brief, but vividly potent snapshot of failed courtship, which in the story’s last paragraph is read as demarcating the end of youth. This elegantly affecting, gently wry account adumbrates two of the dominant themes of the volume—the tenuity of all manner of romantic fictions, both individual and national, and the fall from youthful innocence to mature experience. The second story, “Wifey Redux,” is a much more embittered, dryly reflexive tale of young love gone astray and is narrated by a middle-aged civil servant from Dublin, named Johnathan, who gets arrested while

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vandalising a retail store after assaulting his daughter’s boyfriend. The narrator begins with a brief account of his relationship with his wife Saoirse and the reader discovers that they married young in the late-eighties, while still in the throes of a passionate physical relationship, before moving to Dun Laoghaire, a salubrious coastal suburb in Dublin’s south east. Unlike most of Barry’s short fiction, the narrative takes us to the heartland of Irish politico-cultural power. As Liam Lanigan has observed, south county Dublin has been central to the shape of Ireland’s development and identity since independence and has been “home to many leading figures in the political, legal and cultural apparatus of modern Ireland.” Yet, in its receptivity to globalisation, cosmopolitanism and internationalism it has shown a “reticence about embracing traditional forms of Irish identity, which are often associated with an atavistic hostility towards modernity” (98). The narrative’s setting, then, is particularly resonant in terms of the vexed dialectic between notions of modernity and tradition in the national self-conception.

The history of the narrator’s marriage functions as a microcosm of some of the larger economic transformations of perspective occurring in Ireland as the millennium turned:

We bought a fabulous old terrace house with a view to the seafront in Dun Laoghaire. . . . The high ceilings, the bay windows, the palm tree set in the front garden: haughty Edwardiana. We did it up with the sweat of our love and frequently broke off from our DIY tasks to fuck each other histrionically (it felt like we were running a race) on the stripped floorboards. The house rose 35 percent in value the year after we bought it. It has since octupled in value. (8)

This brief account telescopes a number of changes linked to an acceleration of the processes of modernisation during the Celtic Tiger: Ireland’s economic shift from poverty to prosperity; the fetishisation of property and the obsession with house price rises; and forms of psycho-sexual liberalisation linked to the diminishing authority of the Catholic Church. The astonishing accumulation of wealth—“Our equity by the month swelled, the figures rolling ever upwards with gay abandon”—, the extravagance, even profligacy, of their lovemaking, and the sybaritic, materialist lifestyle that they delight in, all combine to present an apotheosis of Celtic Tiger prodigality.

Johnathan’s daughter Ellie is, according to the narrator, a “perfect facsimile” of his wife—“Wifey Redux”—when she was seventeen. Yet the narrator, in mid-life, feels acutely the “horrible poignancy” of his daughter as uncanny double of his wife as a teenager; in her youth and

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beauty, Ellie highlights not only the narrator’s own increasing sense of his own mortality (and his wife’s), but the erosion of his marriage and the superficial, largely corporeal, foundations upon which it rested (12). His wife, it should be noted, is relatively disengaged from the family due to her apparent alcoholism. Johnathan’s sense of anxiety about his ageing is amplified by Ellie’s rugby-playing boyfriend, Aodhan McAdam, who, with his “Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt,” “eight million quids’ worth of dental work,” and affected “mid-Atlantic” accent, is a walking symbol of Hiberno-American youth culture and Celtic Tiger privilege (13). Johnathan’s vexation towards Aodhan reaches a fever pitch of rage when he discovers that he has written graffiti in a local rain shelter regarding Ellie’s proficiency at oral sex. When Aodhan subsequently breaks up with Ellie, Johnathan appears to suffer a psychotic episode and though Ellie’s exploits are clearly the trigger or catalyst for this mental disturbance, there is a larger context: Johnathan reveals that he suffers from “weeping jags” (11) at night, and several references are made to “Dr. Murtagh,” cognitive therapy, and medication. The tenuity and instability of his psyche are partly engendered, it seems, by his sense of habitus clive, or cleft habitus, as he struggles to adjust dispositionally to his position at the upper echelons of society and its attendant class behaviours and habits.

Johnathan’s psychological volatility is reflected in the final scene in which he goes to Aodhan’s place of work, a hardware store called “Do-it-Rite!,” removes an exclamation mark from the shop sign and proceeds to smash it with a hammer:

I got down on my knees and I started to tap gently with the hammer at the blue plastic of the exclamation mark!until it began to crack here and there, and tiny shatter lines appeared, and these joined up, piece by piece, until the entire surface of the!had become a beautiful mosaic in the blue of the sign, like the trace of tiny backroads on an old map—marking out lost fields, lost kingdoms, a lost world—and I was serene as a bird riding the swells of the morning air over those fields. The squad car appeared. (21)

In these final moments, the narrative seems to ramify with a broader social significance. The motif of the plastic exclamation mark is a symbol deftly compact of the forced hyperbole, brash exhibitionism, and speculative financial over-exaggeration that characterised the most toxic cultures of the Celtic Tiger. And while the mosaic of cracks that appears on its surface might be understood as a reflection of Johnathan’s increasingly

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brittle, fissiparous ego, the image also suggests instances of disjuncture and dislocation in Irish society more generally: the last cartographical figuration—“the trace of tiny backroads on an old map”—infers an obscuration of communities and vernacular landscapes that have been overlaid by more commercialised spaces and consumerist cultures, both of which are exemplified by the “Do-It-Rite!” store itself—a building dedicated to home improvement and the commodification of the domestic.

The story that follows “Wifey Redux” in the volume, “The Fjord of Kilarry,” is also concerned with the effects of purchasing a new property, that most quintessential of Celtic Tiger obsessions, although this tale is set far from the capital. The narrative begins on the day of a storm as the narrator, a poet from Dublin called Caoimhin, recounts how he purchased a hotel near Galway eight months before in the hope that his time spent working on the Western seaboard would allow him to (re-)discover his poetic voice. By day’s end the storm causes the sea to flood the hotel, and Caoimhin moves his customers and staff into an upper room where they dance and drink the night away as the waters engulf the lower levels of the building below. As with the final story of the volume—“Berlin Arkonaplatz—My Lesbian Summer”—the narrative echoes and compresses the form of the Künstlerroman, and is explicitly vexed by questions of aesthetics and the problems of authentically rendering contemporary Irish experience; 6 Caoimhin is hopeful that his new locale will allow him to achieve an advance on his “obtuse, arrhythmic” poetry “about the sex heat of cities” (35). In pursuing this approach, Caoimhin is initially seduced by older conceptions of an ideal Celtic West as mythologised by scholars such as Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan, and fetishised or romanticised by revivalist writers such as W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory, or artists such as Jack Yeats and Paul Henry. This form of mythical West, as Cleary notes, “is always constructed in terms of an imaginary geography which sets off a materialist, modern and mundane ‘east’ against a dreamy, mystical and timeless ‘west’” (Outrageous Fortune 189). The notion of the West as a romantic, transtemporal otherworld, and as a site of cultural resistance to modernity, is quickly and comically demystified by Caoimhin:

I was thinking, the west of Ireland . . . the murmurous ocean . . . the rocky hills hard-founded in a greenish light . . . the cleansing air . . . the stoats peeping shyly from the little gaps in the drystone walls. . . .

6. Though it could be argued that, technically, the narrator is too old (at 40) for the story to echo the structure of the Künstlerroman, the denouement suggests a moment of self-realisa-tion and artistic epiphany, and the final line implies an advance to maturity: “The gloom of youth had at last lifted” (45).

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Yes. It would all do to make a new man of me. Of course, I hadn’t counted on having to listen to my summer staff, a pack of energetic young Belarusians, fucking each other at all angles of the clock.

And the ocean turned out to gibber rather than a murmur.Gibber gibber—whoosh. Gibber gibber—whoosh. (30)

The narrator even mocks his early enthusiasm for recording the particular idiom of his customers, wryly noting that he “had kept a surreptitious notebook under the bar” to collect unusual locutions and expressions (33)—surely a parodic echo of Synge on Aran with his ear to a chink in the floorboards eavesdropping on the serving girls’ talk below him. In contrast to the rural idyll or the spiritually and culturally rich society that Caoimhin is seeking, he is confronted with a rather grim, depressing landscape and locals and customers who are often lewd, bawdy and brashly materialist. Killary, it rapidly becomes clear, has not been insulated from the globalising effects of modern Ireland.

This is perhaps most apparent in the narrator’s conversation with Mick Harty, “distributor of bull semen for the vicinity,” and his wife Vivien who regale him with their recent trip to an upmarket restaurant owned by “the Dutch faggots” (30). Despite the Harty’s abhorrent homophobia, the apparent success, even fact, of a business owned by an openly homosexual couple bespeaks the changing attitudes to sex and sexuality that occurred in Ireland from the nineties to the present. In the space of a generation, Irish society and its constitutional and legal frameworks transformed from exhibiting a deeply conservative attitude to LGBTQ individuals to adopting a strikingly liberal position. Though the Hartys do not exhibit this greater tolerance, they are prepared to spend their money at the restaurant, and take pleasure in broadcasting their gustatory indulgence to Caoimhin, seemingly as a testament to their affluence. Vivien is sure to tell him “precisely” what they had paid for their meal: “‘Two starters, two mains, we shared a dessert, two bottles of wine, two cappuccinos,’ she said. . . . ‘Hundred and thirty-six euro, even—not cheap, Caoimhin’” (31). The Hartys’ casual frequenting of a high-end restaurant also exemplifies what might be termed the democratisation of haute cuisine dining in Celtic Tiger Ireland, a change from earlier decades when, according to Brian Murphy, “eating out involved two extremes, fast food and fine dining, depending on whether one belonged to a wealthy minority or the poorer, and more widespread majority” (162). These changes in Ireland’s food service industry were part of a “gastronomic transformation” in Ireland in which the middle classes “went from the toasted special in the local pub to brunches, lunches and dinners in upmarket restaurants, wine bars and

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hotels.” The emergence of this new “gastronomic cultural field” (165) was engendered not just by an increase in individual wealth and income, but by the “returning diaspora and increased foreign travel from the mid-1990s until the end of the Celtic Tiger” (166). Another contributing factor was the rapid growth of the “non-national” immigrant population within Ireland during this period, who brought with them their own cuisine, culinary expertise and food cultures.

The presence of Dutch restaurateurs, and Caoimhin’s Belarussian bar staff, is also suggestive of the transformative effects of immigration on Ireland’s private and professional spheres at this juncture. From the early nineties to the late noughties Ireland rapidly changed from a “mono-ethnic nation State” into one with “a comparatively large immigrant population”’ (Fanning 119). An accelerating factor in the rapid increase in immigration during the Celtic Tiger period was the decision by the Irish state in 2004 to permit migrants from ten new EU member states from Eastern Europe to live and gain employment in the country without visas. As Fanning notes, this resulted in “perhaps the greatest act of social engineering since the seventeenth-century plantations” yet generated “little or no political response” (123). However, the same year, the country held a Referendum on Citizenship that resulted in the denial of the right of citizenship to Irish-born children of non-citizens. At the very moment that the country became considerably more accessible as a migrant destination, citizenship for migrants became more difficult to achieve. In effect, a “neo-liberal approach to immigration, which welcomed migrants able to participate in the labour market . . . somehow co-existed with policies that deepened distinctions between ‘nationals’ and ‘non-nationals’” (Fanning 122). This deeply contradictory, even cognitively dissonant, response to immigration is reflected, to an extreme extent, by Vivien’s attitude to migrants in the narrative: though she bewails “these bastards from the back of nowhere” who “take our fuckin jobs,” she happily gives her custom to establishments owned by non-Irish individuals or with a high proportion of non-Irish workers (38).

The irony of Vivien’s position is also particularly acute given the story’s setting in the West of Ireland from whence so many Irish men and women emigrated during and after the Great Famine to seek new livelihoods in foreign climes. This context is emphasised by Bill Knott, a drinker at the bar who, in discussing an escape on a boat to Clare island, comments: “‘Of course, it would not be the first time . . . that the likes of us would be sent hoppin’ for the small boats’” (42). The legacy and trauma of Ireland’s colonial history is again evoked at the end of the narrative when Caoimhin states defiantly that “1648 was a year shy of Cromwell’s landing

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in Ireland, and already the inn at Killary fjord was in business—it would see out this disaster, too” (45). In adducing two of the most catastrophic periods of Ireland’s colonial past—the Famine and the Cromwellian Plantations—the narrative establishes a larger historical context in which to comprehend Ireland’s experience of modernity. As Cleary has cogently articulated, in Ireland, “modernisation via colonisation preceded modernisation via industrialisation” with the result that the country underwent a profoundly different transition to modernity than other European nations (7). While for the Germans, English or French, “modernity was associated with domestic innovation, industrial trailblazing, national aggrandisement and even global pre-eminence,” within Ireland modernity signalled a profound depletion in sovereignty, economic emasculation and mismanagement, and the evisceration of its indigenous Gaelic culture and language (9).

Given the narrative’s evocation of this darker aspect of Ireland’s historic experience of modernity, the imminent financial crash—adumbrated by the rising flood that engulfs the hotel—can therefore be understood as the most recent destructive feature of Ireland’s long and deeply problematic relationship to modernisation. And while the denouement would seem to suggest an apparent fatalism in the face of overwhelming, transnational forces of capital, the elongated historical continuum established by the story helps to illuminate and productively interrogate the inherent structural frailties of the late capitalist system that Ireland has become immersed within. The focus on the rising tidal waters that overwhelm the hotel, combined with the narrative’s increasingly eschatological tone, also suggest capitalism’s central role in the global climate crisis and its capacity to trigger ecological and environmental collapse of a scope and magnitude that could produce civilisational collapse. In this regard, Malcom Sen has astutely read Caoimhin’s patrons’ apparent indifference to the rising tide as a parallel to a larger inertia in the face of global ecological crises, arguing that: “Alcoholic merriment behaves as a metonymic stand-in for a culture of denial and petty provincialisms that suffocate an imaginative capacity to comprehend what is global in nature” (21).

“The Fjord of Killary” offers what is perhaps Barry’s most sophisticated and complex conception of modernity in the volume, which is to say that it reflects and interrogates many of the vexed antimonies and anxious uncertainties connected both to Ireland’s historical and contemporary experience of modernisation. The story clearly registers (if comically or parodically on occasion) some of the positive, even emancipatory, features that attended the rise of the Celtic Tiger: greater sexual liberalisation and an increased tolerance of a wider range of

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sexualities; a diversification and opening out of gastronomic and culinary practices; a growth in immigration and ethnic diversity; and the disruption of settled cultural hierarchies. However, its quasi-apocalyptic denouement symbolically adumbrates the more destructive economic and ecological impact of Ireland’s embrace of late capitalist culture as part of its journey of modernisation. The narrative does not endorse the neoliberal consensus that emerged during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger experiment, yet neither does it reflexively revalorise cultural tropes that comprehend and romanticise the West as a locus of a more authentic, pre-modern rural nationhood. And if, more generally, Barry’s short fiction implies that Irish culture has become increasingly threatened by the homogenising forces of a globalising economic order, it also adduces the greater plurality of identity and cultural expression that have emerged in the new millennium. These dialectical processes are echoed in Barry’s varied aesthetic modes across the two volumes, in which largely conventional forms of naturalist representation are intermingled with mythic, fantastic, and more metafictional practices and postmodern procedures. Indeed, what is particularly impressive throughout both volumes of short stories is the variety of styles and tones Barry adopts and adapts in pursuit of a form befitting of Ireland’s late modernity. In doing so, his writing also consistently reveals a keen eye for the more public delusions, pretensions, and excesses that marked early twenty-first century Irish society. However, it might be argued that Barry’s most searching insights into Ireland’s changing Weltanschauung are not in his mimetic or satirical rendering of the changing socio-economic textures of Irish life, but in his exploration of the subtle manner in which those transformations play upon the world of his characters’ inner consciousness—his comprehension of how the Celtic Tiger altered one’s way of being in the world and the forms of language used to comprehend and interrogate reality. In this sense, Barry’s work contributes to what might be termed an interior history of Ireland’s recent modernity as it ramified upon the darker kingdoms of the national psyche.

Simon Workman Carlow College, St. Patrick’s, Ireland

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WORKS CITED

Barry, Kevin. There Are Little Kingdoms. Dublin: The Stinging Fly Press, 2007. Print.

---. Dark Lies the Island. London: Vintage Books, 2012. Print.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1979. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Print.

Cleary, Joe. “Introduction: Ireland and Modernity.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture. Eds. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 1-22. Print.

---. Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2007. Print.

---. “Sing, Muse, of Irish Suburbia.” Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture. Eds. Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018. vi-ix. Print.

Conlon, Evelyn. Telling. Belfast: The Black Staff Press, 2000. Print.

Coulter, Coleman and Steve Coleman, eds. The End of Irish History?: Critical Approaches to the Celtic Tiger. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2003. Print.

Dekter, Gregory. “‘Black and White, Flickering’: The Visual Cycle in Kevin Barry’s Short Fiction.” Contemporary Irish Short Stories. Spec. issue of Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 42 (2019): 159-77. Print.

Flood, Alison. “Julian Gough Slams Fellow Irish Novelists as Priestly Caste Cut Off from the Culture.” The Guardian 11 Feb. 2010. Web. 27 June 2020.

Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Print.

Ingman, Heather. A History of the Irish Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1990. Print.

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Kiberd, Declan. The Irish Writer and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

Lanigan, Liam. “A Severed Space: The Suburbs of South Dublin in Contemporary Irish Fiction.” Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture. Eds. Eoghan Smith and Simon Workman. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018. 97-118. Print.

Mianowski, Marie. Post Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. Print.

Murphy, Brian. “‘A Hundred Thousand Welcomes’: Food and Wine as Cultural Signifiers.” From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-cultural Critique of Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath. Eds. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2014. 161-73. Print.

Negra, Diane. “Urban Space, Luxury Retaining and the New Irishness.” Cultural Studies 24.6 (2010): 836-53. Print.

O’Connor, Joseph. “Riding the Celtic Tiger.” The Guardian 9 Aug. 2008. Web. 27 June 2020.

Scarbrough, Gwen. “New Places, Non-Places and the Changing Landscape of the Irish Pub.” Belongings: Shaping Identity in Modern Ireland. Eds. Mary P. Corcoran and Perry Share. Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2008. 57-72. Print.

Sen, Malcom. “Risk and Refuge: Contemplating Precarity in Contemporary Irish Fiction.” Irish University Review 49.1 (2019): 13-31. Print.

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Cet article présente les deux recueils de nouvelles de Kevin Barry, There are Little Kingdoms (2007) et Dark Lies the Island (2011), comme des exemples de l’agilité et de l’élasticité dont le genre de la nouvelle a fait preuve pour répondre à l’évolution de la situation socio-économique de l’Irlande au cours des dernières décennies. Son travail confirme l’observation de Heather Ingman selon laquelle « le lien entre la nouvelle et la modernité n’a jamais été aussi évident que dans les dernières décennies du xxe siècle et dans la première décennie du xxie siècle » (226). À travers son œuvre, Barry exploite les possibilités formelles offertes par la forme de la nouvelle pour explorer les causes et les contextes complexes de la modernisation en Irlande tout en interrogeant la modernité dans un large éventail de ses manifestations et significations possibles, notamment comme une phase anti-traditionnelle avec une transformation sociale caractérisée par la libéralisation culturelle ; comme un recalibrage économique systémique orienté vers le néolibéralisme et les logiques du marché international ; comme une accélération du changement technologique, de l’urbanisation et de la mondialisation ; et (surtout en ce qui concerne l’Irlande) comme concomitante à la colonisation et à une menace pour la culture indigène.

TEXTING A SPINOFF: DANIEL MALLORY ORTBERG’S HYBRID “LITTLE WOMEN”

For Birgit Spengler, so many literary spinoffs of classic American works have been published in recent decades that they constitute a genre (15). The past half a dozen years alone have witnessed at least eleven novel-length spinoffs of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (to add to more than fifty earlier ones), plus a board book, three graphic novels, and numerous other adaptations, condensations, and illustrated editions (see Clark, “From Babylit” 433-45). Not to mention Mallory (now Daniel) Ortberg’s story “Little Women,” in his 2014 Texts from Jane Eyre, and Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters. The story consists of invented text messages among the four March sisters and their neighbor Laurie: Jo objects to Meg’s forthcoming marriage; Beth bemoans how much she is dying; Jo declines Laurie’s proposal and later tells him she plans to marry Professor Bhaer. On the one hand, the piece raises questions about the functions of literary spinoffs, including those of Little Women. Can it stand alone? Does it need to stand alone? On the other hand, Ortberg’s work raises questions about the nature of the short story. If “Little Women” is a collation of text messages, one of his “weird genres” (Havrilesky), does it constitute a short story? Must it achieve a “single effect”? Or does it effectively enact hybridity?

With respect to spinoffs and adaptations more generally, being one does not make Ortberg’s “Little Women” derivative; it does not make the short story inferior to the novel. Theorists of adaptation, such as Linda Hutcheon, argue that an adaptation should be able to stand on its own (Adaptation 127). The major film versions of Little Women can do so, for instance: one does not need to have read the book to make sense of the movies. Yet most of the two dozen

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adaptations to the big and small screens reductively focus on the marriage plotting—Greta Gerwig’s 2019 Little Women is a welcome exception.

Ortberg too relies on the marriage plotting, but some of his touches are brilliant. Take, for example, Jo’s blithe assumption that, even when the sisters’ father is physically present in the household, he is still very absent. After Ortberg’s Meg announces her engagement to John Brooke, Jo proclaims:

this is the worst thingthat has ever happenedto anyonesince Father died. (Texts 122)

Jo responds to Meg’s ensuing objection by saying, “oh / didn’t he? / for some reason I thought he’d died” (122). The reader of Alcott’s novel might be tempted to agree: even after Mr. March returns from the Civil War battlefields, he is all but invisible.

Thus Ortberg’s adaptation also functions as a parody, as an “imitation with critical ironic distance, whose irony can cut both ways” (Hutcheon, Parody 37). The ironies in his vignettes responding to Hamlet, for instance, “cut both ways” by critiquing not only the predecessor work but modern mores. In them a very adolescent Hamlet (we eventually learn he is 37) refuses to leave his room to come down for dinner; an exchange with an accommodating adult begins as follows:

hey kiddoare you coming down for dinner

fuck you

okaysorry honey

your not sorry at all

do you want me to bring you a sandwich?

i wish i was dead

okay honeybut do you want a sandwich first

what kind of sandwich (32)

Ortberg pokes fun at both the solipsism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and modern drama-queen adolescents and their indulgent parents. He also critiques the breezy modern practice of text messaging—here and in his “Little Women.” In doing so, he contributes to the project in recent fiction of “destroy[ing] the Arnoldian, nineteenth-century separation between high

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and low culture,” creating opportunities for “democratization and potential revitalization” (Hutcheon, Parody 80-81). Linda Hutcheon is here describing the uses of parody, which are heightened, in Ortberg’s case, when he hybridizes the high art of the short story and the low art of text messaging.

Ortberg’s story is not just a parody but also a spinoff, re-visioning a predecessor text by setting it in a different time or place or by providing an alternate perspective (see Spengler 11). A spinoff may offer a corrective, but, like parody, it is also an act of homage: it can embody what Ortberg has described as an “equal mix of love and teasing” (“Mallory Ortberg”). I would argue that spinoffs of Little Women simultaneously point to gaps or aporias in the earlier text, such as the significant absence of the fictional father, and also honor a literary foremother who is achieving canonicity, among adults, even as the readership among the young is declining—and, indeed, the homage may in part be responding to, compensating in part for, that falling off.

Yet this story is not fully autonomous, as an adaptation. One reason why has to do with the tension between its being an adaptation and the much vaunted emphasis in some short story criticism on singleness of effect. For one of the challenges of adapting Little Women is how to respond to one of its strengths: its attention to the subjectivity of not just one but all four March sisters. It is true that Jo’s subjectivity gets more play in the novel than that of her sisters, but all four have their own chapters and other focalizing moments. The book is a kind of quartet, and attempts to adapt it generally need to address all four figures. Lisa Brown, for instance, has created a series of three-panel graphic-novel redactions of canonical works, but her three-panel rendition of Little Women has—four panels. That is part of the joke. The other part has to do with how to render a succinct account of Beth, the angel in the house, the sister who is so self-effacing as to disappear altogether through death. For Brown, the three other sisters are alliteratively smart, sweet, and spoiled; and Beth is . . . dead. Not that Brown’s adaptation can stand alone. It is difficult to do so in a very small compass—or even when, as in Ortberg’s story, the text is somewhat longer but still just under a thousand words. Yet even if Ortberg’s Beth is not fully autonomous—the segment in which she appears might seem extraneous to those who have not read Alcott’s novel—his Jo and Meg are sufficiently established in their narrative segments, Laurie too.

These segments, in the opening and closing and much of the middle, representing exchanges among Meg, Jo, and Laurie, relate to the question of marriage, whether Meg’s or Jo’s. Yet a middle segment attends to Beth and dying. Since Amy is not directly drawn into Ortberg’s adaptation otherwise, she gets to be Beth’s text-message interlocutor, even though in Alcott’s fictional world Jo might be the one to perform such a role. 1 Amy’s exchange with Beth

1. In the online version of the story, Beth is not initially signaled as the person to whom Amy is texting, unlike in the book version. It thus requires even more knowledge, by the reader, of

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does not at first appear particularly illuminating: “but / what exactly / what are you dying of,” Amy asks. “[T]his sewing needle / it’s so very heavy,” Beth states, and Amy responds, “well / put it down” (124). Ortberg does offer some critique of the novel in this segment, underscoring how Beth’s illness and death seem almost unmotivated in the novel, more a matter of plot convenience and symbolic function (what else is there for a too-good-to-be-true sister to do but acquiesce to the ultimate self-sacrifice?). Ortberg thus offers some critique. Otherwise it is arguable that the exchange with Amy falls flat, lacks what John Gerlach might call “point” (“Margins” 84). Nor does the segment function like a substitute for events in a hypothetical plot, as short story theorist Suzanne Ferguson might query (223); it does not seem to push us toward some deep, profound understanding. Nor does it seem to work as part of a juxtapositional plot, with a strong thematic connection to the rest of the story (see Jauss 146-48). Beyond the sororal link, there is some thematic connection—Beth’s dying and Father’s presumed death—but the connection is not pivotal. The interchange simply makes the story seem fragmented, simply enables all four sisters to make an appearance. 2 It creates a tension between the unity of the piece and its hailing of a novel with four central characters.

There is also tension in a short story adaptation of a novel between being novelistic and being short story-like. Adaptations complicate the relationship of the two genres beyond what short story theorists and practitioners have long debated. If, in Julio Cortázar’s formulation, the short story delimits an event by acting as an “opening” for the reader, providing an opportunity to project “intelligence and the sensibility toward something” (247), then a short story adaptation may provide an opening not so much on our own reality as on that of the predecessor text. This intertextuality provides an extra postmodernist, self-referential layering. Ortberg’s “opening” projects a critique, pointedly underscoring, for instance, the father’s absence from Alcott’s story even when he returns from his duties in the Civil War; the dearth of explanation and overt motivation for the death of the angel in the house; and, as we learn at the end of the story, Jo’s antiromantic choice of a mate. (Alcott liked to deflate sentiment and romance.)

For Ortberg’s “Little Women” gets its short story closure, its aha, its click at the end, its epiphany or “electric shock” (see Lohafer, Introduction 109; Pritchett 113), by enacting a critique common among readers of Alcott’s novel. Much to the chagrin of many—then and now, in fan letters and fanfiction, in classrooms and scholarly articles, and in the Twitterverse (#teambhaer vs.

Alcott’s Little Women.2. The story is not consistently fragmented in the way that Donald Barthelme’s stories are, raising questions about the nature of realistic and other fiction. Instead, the fragmentation seems incidental. Then again, as Gerlach suggests (“Narrative” 44), a fragment may in itself push the reader toward a paradigmatic reading, lyrical, metaphorical.

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#teamlaurie)—Jo marries not the attractive, comradely, and wealthy boy next door, Laurie, but the much older, kindly, impecunious German professor whom she meets in New York and who is more fatherly than conventionally attractive, his casting in recent film versions to the contrary. 3 Ortberg exaggerates what could be seen as Professor Bhaer’s unattractiveness. “[H]e’s the most wonderful man / very old / much older than me” (127), the story’s Jo texts Laurie. Admittedly, that statement is only somewhat more emphatic than Jo’s comment in the novel: “He’s most forty, so it’s no harm” if she peeks at him (Alcott 263).

Alcott’s Jo goes on to describe Bhaer as “rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, droll nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one’s ears good,” adding, “he hadn’t a handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth; yet I liked him, for he had a fine head; his linen was spandy nice, and he looked like a gentleman, though two buttons were off his coat and there was a patch on one shoe” (263). 4 In Ortberg’s story, in contrast, Jo enthuses,

his mustache is enormousbushy and gray and covered in crumbsall of him is covered in crumbshe’s filthy haha (128)

That is hardly Alcott’s Bhaer, with his “spandy nice” linen, which is to say, a very white and neat shirt. Snowy linen and patched shoes signaled impecunious gentility and moral virtue in the nineteenth century; even now, cleanliness is associated at times with godliness and also with middle-class attractiveness. Jo may use the text-message term “haha” to suggest some ironic distance, 5 yet she still seems to revel in the filth. The crumbs in Bhaer’s mustache and elsewhere are neither the chic-casual, scruffy look that some men now aspire to nor the nineteenth-century look of an impecunious gentleman, but simply what modern readers might dismiss as “an unplanned, unkempt look” (“What’s Cool”)—even if “filthy” may hint at something more funky and potentially erotic than Alcott’s Jo would directly countenance. I am inclined to think that Ortberg overdoes his belittling of Bhaer, but he is nonetheless playing out a common response to Alcott’s novel.

3. For examples of resistance to Bhaer, see accounts in Clark, Afterlife esp. p. 18. For counte-rarguments, see Massé 323-46; Stein, “Getting” and “Me.”4. I am quoting from what scholars consider the standard text. Most trade editions still use the “refined” text that appeared in 1880; Ortberg, like most modern readers, probably read that version. In it, Bhaer has not a “droll nose” but a “good” one, and not “spandy nice” but “very nice” linen. For discussion of the changes in the 1880 revision, see Phillips, “Quinny-Dingles” 83-96.5. See the top Urban Dictionary definition for “haha” (jamieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee).

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More aptly, from my perspective, Ortberg’s Jo then says that Bhaer “hates my writing”; indeed, “I really cannot overemphasize / how much he disapproves of my voice as a writer / wants me to change everything about it” (128). Alcott’s professor likewise disapproves of Jo’s writing, not so much her voice but her choice to write the sensation stories that he lets her know that he knows that she has been writing. His disapproval leads her to stop writing, for a while at least, and certainly stop forever the dangerous mode that she was indulging in.

When Jo announces that she plans to marry Bhaer, Laurie’s initial response, in Ortberg’s story, is an understated doubletake, an “oh” and “I see.” In replying to Jo’s description of the censure of her writing, he proffers an ironic “well / how can I compete with that” (128). Jo is then suitably obtuse: “exactly / please don’t blame yourself” (128). Ortberg is therein eliciting the response of many readers to the novel: the bemusement or dismay that Jo decides to marry Bhaer. Alcott claimed that she responded to the demands of “many enthusiastic young ladies” that Jo marry, and marry Laurie in particular, that “out of perversity” she “went & made a funny match for her” (Alcott to Elizabeth Powell, 20 March [1869], Myerson and Shealy 125). Part of the power of the novel derives from the tension, the disjunction, between the pairing off that occurs in Part 2 and what many readers have desired. Ortberg’s story underscores Jo’s inconsistency about marriage, as she belies her earlier claim about never marrying, parodically telescoping a change that in the novel developed over pages and years. The story provides what Austen Wright might call an “unresolved contradiction” (124), what Thomas Leitch might describe as “a critique of the notion of a stable and discrete personal identity constituted by an individual’s determinate actions” (134), and opens up the story to what Ian Reid might claim is “an unstable area of textual play” (309).

Many modern readers would have preferred that the semi-autobiographical Jo not marry at all, that she not capitulate to a man, giving up writing at his behest, even if she finds ways to be a co-leader of the school they go on to establish and, in sequels, returns to writing, to great acclaim, or at least popularity. Alcott herself never married. And in further support of queer possibilities, in her Little Women Jo wishes that she were a boy and that she could marry Meg herself so that the nuclear family would not be broken up. As a student wonderingly asked in a recent class, “Jo is a trans man?” 6 Perhaps it is only fitting that Ortberg’s translation of the novel into story be by someone who would later identify as a trans man.

Not only is the story a parodic adaptation, but visible formal features raise additional questions. The form is hybrid, as the short story presents itself as a series of text messages. The latter is signaled by the title—of the story itself, “Texts from Little Women,” in the online version; of the book in

6. See also Schweitzer and Shelden.

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which it later appears, Texts from “Jane Eyre,” and Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters. Text messaging is further signaled, in the hard-copy version, by the visual appearance of the page. In the version published online, in the Hairpin, changes in writer are indicated by alternating roman and italic font. 7 In the book version, the words are in roman font, but consecutive, uninterrupted messages from an individual writer are surrounded by rounded boxes, like the boxy outlines of texts on a cellphone (but without the tails that signal speech balloons on some screens). The outlines are teal. As on a smartphone, one speaker’s words are justified to the left margin; the other’s, to the right. The left-justified messages have a white filler surrounding the black letters; the right-justified messages, a pale teal. Jo’s texts are always left-justified, white-backgrounded. If readers of English-language books treat left-justified text as the standard, Jo would supply the norm—as indeed she does for many readers of Alcott’s text. Yet, of course, a texter’s own messages on many cellphones are right-justified. Jo would thus seem to be denied the position of the focalizing character. Nevertheless, her centrality is reinforced in the story by her participation in almost all of the verbal exchanges, certainly in more than any other character.

In any case, the overall effect of the page layout creates what Paul Benzon might describe as “not a hybrid work of text and image, but rather a liminal, interstitial practice of text as image, image as text” (76). We cannot just treat the marks on the page as transparent, as we might when reading text only. Although “[t]he spatiality of English texts as physical objects is normally backgrounded,” as W.J.T. Mitchell has pointed out (550), that is not the case here. The layout and use of color call attention to themselves. They likewise require the reader to do something more, to participate actively in interpreting how the layout signals changes in writer and to figure out who is writing when: “MEG / MEG / MEG” the first box begins, and the second starts with “Jo,” so we determine who is being addressed and then infer who is writing each message (120). Reading the texts is simultaneously a verbal and a visual experience.

Another visual feature, in both online and book versions, is the frequent line breaks. In the online version these seem to demarcate discrete messages,

7. Jo’s lines are in italics, and it would be tempting to claim that that is appropriate for the rambunctious, outspoken Jo, who is likely (in both online and print versions) to write entirely in capital letters and also breathless cascades of consecutive messages. Still, the decidedly non-rambunctious Beth’s lines are italicized as well. As for the text, that of the book version is nearly identical to that of the online one, except that Ortberg has added a couple of lines for emphasis or clarity, replaced most dashes with line breaks (making the texts read more like text messages and less like spoken dialogue), adjusted a couple of line breaks, and added six sets of three small, centered gray squares to mark changes in scene or time. I am grateful to Oliver Scheiding for raising questions about text messaging in response to a shorter oral version of this essay.

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and I read them that way in the book version too, even though the lines are not here assigned to separate boxes. 8 These rapid-fire messages hint at a style of text messaging common among young adults: cascades of messages, fragments that build up to a full sentence in the course of several separate texts.

As for other text-message features, although Ortberg does include such stalwarts as omg, lol, and in other pieces, he does not in this story. It is tempting to suggest that in “Little Women” he wanted to communicate as much to those who are not fluent in text-message-ese as to those who are, perhaps even elude the putdowns by some elites that such language phenomena are “word-devil spawn” (see Lebduska). 9 But the dearth here is probably happenstance—and Jo does, in fact, use the text-message term “haha.”

Despite the visual features I have been outlining, texting also resembles speaking in many ways; a communications scholar has described it as a “speech-writing blend” (Thurlow 14). With respect to Ortberg’s story, I tend to read the text exchanges the way that I read dramatic dialogue on a printed page. Another feature of Ortberg’s text further reinforces this sense of characters speaking. When Laurie is apologizing for having pushed Jo on the question of marriage, for instance, he says, “I know how you feel about marriage / and—and everything” (126). Jo has previously rejected his proposal and he seems reticent about reminding her: that “and—and everything” is what might appear in a traditional work of fiction or drama. Yet, it evokes the hesitation and repetition one might speak more than the repetitions one might text, such as the “MEG / MEG / MEG” with which the story opens. A simple “and everything,” without the stutter, might better capture the rhetoric of text messaging. Even a simple repetition of and, without the dash, could reflect the mistyping that occurs in text messages.

To the extent that text messages do resemble speech, they may seem to be ephemeral, instantaneous, embodied. They provide what Roger Chartier might call “a moving, malleable, open text” (144). Yet although “[y]ou feel in a place that is private and ephemeral, . . . your communications are public and forever” (Turkle 258): they embody the “enduring ephemeral” (Chun 148). Which, of course, self-reflexively describes the private communications of characters whose words are nonetheless made public in a story. Furthermore, the first version of Ortberg’s story was published online, in a journal that is no longer active but that still, as of this writing, has an online presence. The ephemeral lines of the fictional texters appeared in an ephemeral journal, thus to some degree recapitulating the ephemerality of texting. Or at least the

8. My sense of the rhetoric of text messages is that texters rarely insert line breaks in informal messages. The discrete lines in the hard-copy story read more like discrete consecutive texts—as, indeed, they do in the online version.9. Lebduska resists such a construal of emoji. Not that emoticons are all that common in real text messages, despite the media fascination with them (see Crystal esp. 22, 39).

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story was ephemeral until it appeared in a book, whose contents are at least presumptively less transient than what is online.

Text messaging is also instantaneous, as correspondents write and reply in real time. Or seemingly in real time, seemingly instantaneously—for although one may feel pressure to respond quickly, one can also take a few minutes to craft a message, to write with some care (see Turkle 264-66; Crystal 28-29). Still, even if their instantaneousness is only proximate, text messages can convey immediacy: a sense of being in the present as well as a “sense of presence, made more immediate, more palpable because of our technological understanding that the writer has just sent a message,” as the writing studies scholar Lisa Lebduska has said in a slightly different context. There is a sense of emotional presence, of intimacy, of privacy between two people even if they are physically separated: texting “allows an intimate person-to-person contact while preserving distance” (Crystal 109). Certainly the messages in Ortberg’s story convey considerable affect, from Jo’s strong opposition to Meg’s marriage to Laurie’s understated response to Jo’s announcement of her engagement to Bhaer.

Indeed, text messaging affords traces of the body, especially to the extent that we attribute texting to an originating body and to thumbwork. Yet embodiment and materiality are vexed issues here, not least because “Little Women” enacts not actual texting but a representation of it. We may be reminded of the materiality of the page, and there may be some traces of the body, but at the same time text-messaging enables communication not face to face but screen to screen, faceless, body-less. In only some of the pieces in Ortberg’s collection are there verbal reminders that characters are texting at a physical distance from each other—“be home in five!!!” Cathy’s father texts her, as he is coming home with Heathcliff, adding, by the way, “(you’re going to LOVE him)” (Texts 115). 10 Do the characters in “Little Women” communicate at a physical distance? Possibly. It is least likely in the interchange between Amy and Beth: when the latter says, “i don’t think ill make it through the night,” and Amy replies, “well I’ll be here if you need me” (125), is she “here” in the room with Beth or just somewhere in the house? That “here” does nevertheless imply emotional presence and availability.

However, any evocation of emotional connection in this exchange is counteracted by parody. After Beth announces, “im dying tonight,” she texts, “yes im definitely dying / oh its terrible how much im dying just now” (124). Alcott’s Beth never says anything so histrionic, anything that so distances us from the affect of the narrative (even if some latterday readers find the almost-dying/not-dying/finally-dying pattern a bit drawn out sentimentally). 11 There

10. Another example of Ortberg’s use of the affordances of texting is that Hemingway’s war-wounded, impotent Jake Barnes has sexted pictures to Lady Brett Ashley.11. Or awkward—on George Cukor’s decision to retain Beth’s trajectory, despite its awkward-ness, in his 1933 film version, see Clark, Afterlife 123.

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is intimacy, in short, but also physical and often emotional distance implied in Ortberg’s story.

The philosopher Jacquelyn Kegley has suggested that in addition to enabling one “to keep one’s feelings at a distance,” or even as part of that ability, texting can give one “a sense of control” (292-93). One can choose to look at text messages or not, one can respond or not, one can communicate when one feels like it, not just when in the physical presence of the correspondent; in short, one can opt in and out of communicating with greater ease than in face-to-face conversations. Jo, the primary controlling force in both novel and story, is the character who initiates and ends most of the seven sets of exchanges in the story. Once she ends an exchange by saying, oxymoronically, “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response” (121). Meg has been trying to suggest that Amy could replace her in the production of Jo’s adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress. (Alcott’s Amy was particularly maladept at acting in Jo’s productions, and Jo would hardly want her to stand in for a lead role.) Jo’s response that claims not to be a response, in Ortberg’s story, overtly signals the end of the exchange. Jo exerts control over the messaging much as she tries to over Meg’s life.

Furthermore, as Sherry Turkle has said of virtual worlds, “people are flattened to personae” (18). The dying Beth is particularly flattened as her increasing disconnects from the world are parodically heightened to absurdity. When Amy asks what Beth is dying of, the latter replies, “this sewing needle / it’s so very heavy” (124). Beth’s response is topically disconnected—she is apparently so focused on the self (unlike Alcott’s Beth) that she ignores the tenor of her sister’s question. Yet she provides an answer that is ironically fitting: that she is dying of the sewing needle—or of confinement to domesticity, the reader familiar with Alcott’s novel might muse, treating the incongruous response metaphorically. Beth’s answer also creates another disconnect because it appears in a text message. It is true that some hint of her physical weakness is conveyed by her omission of most apostrophes and all capital letters, including for first-person pronouns 12—as if the additional thumbstrokes would be too onerous (or she is sufficiently non-assertive that she cannot even capitalize “I”). Still, if she is so weak that she cannot lift a needle, how does she text? I am brought up short by her needle comment, forcibly reminded that I am not reading spoken but text-message dialogue. If texting is an isolating activity (as indeed Beth’s non-responsiveness to Amy’s comment hints) and if it disembodies communication, the sewing-needle comment and the contradiction it evokes can perhaps resist such disembodiment, for it can remind us of the absent presence of Beth’s cellphone and of her frail thumbs. Ortberg’s story places disembodiment in tension with traces of the body, and it may be that, in part, those traces lend affective power to the work.

12. Jo omits some capital letters too—and adds others for emphasis. Yet she seems not so much self-effacing, like Beth, as rule-breaking.

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Then there is the very materiality of the needle. Beth is unusually connected to materiality in her messages, more concerned about objects, about things, than most of the other characters—unlike Alcott’s ethereal Beth, who contrasts with Meg and Amy, two very material girls. In addition to the needle, Ortberg’s Beth comments on a window, which is “so terribly full of glass,” and a house and sun, specifically the memory of having “once stepped outside the house / to stand in the sun” (124, 125). Things take on a significance, a life, beyond being mere objects. 13 As the character about to lose embodiment through death, or to become in effect mere body, without life, she seems to have an unusually intense relationship to things even while she distances herself from them—whether the things are problematic (needle, window, glass) or nostalgically remembered (sun). Things, in general, seem to delimit and constrain her. 14

Jo is the other character to obsess about things in Ortberg’s story, but her excess is associated with a free-floating fullness of embodiment, not its dearth or (usually) potential loss, a fullness emphasized by her cascading style of messaging, whether she is proposing unusual festivities for Meg’s wedding (fireworks, footraces, feats of strength) or describing the physical appearance of her own eventual intended (as previously noted). Things confine or hurt Beth; for Jo, however, they enable imaginative flights. As a modern—or incipiently modernist—figure, Jo is “not restricted by things but inspired by them” (B. Brown 135). After accusing Meg of “ranting / . . . pure gibberish” when she says she loves her John, for instance, Jo tries to reduce the love to an attraction to things:

does he have a horse?is that what this is about?does he have a sword gun or a railroador aa nice hat or something? (122)

13. My arguments here are informed by those of Bill Brown. He focuses, however, on manu-factured objects when he wonders about “why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies,” effectively “infusing manufactured objects with a metaphysical di-mension” (4). I note non-manufactured objects in Ortberg’s story as well since the effects of a horse and the sun seem similar to those of manufactured objects, even if their “metaphysical dimension” may seem more “natural.” Here as in other short stories, as May has argued, com-pared to the novel, “detail is transformed into metaphoric significance” (“Why” 18).14. Or as Taussig has argued with respect to Sylvia Plath, “death animates things” (305). Beth is also the character most tied or confined to place, most physically placed and embodied—thanks to the nature of her relationship to things (metonymic more than metaphoric), thanks to the tethering that Amy’s “I’ll be here” might imply (as if Amy is not always “here” but Beth might be), thanks to the mention of having once stepped out of the house (only once?).

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On the one hand, Jo’s questions may remind us of how Alcott’s Meg has been tempted by materialism but overcomes it when she decides to marry the impoverished John Brooke. The things that Ortberg’s Jo enumerates gesture toward defining Meg’s attraction in terms of machismo, wealth and—perhaps physical appearance. Jo’s exuberant enumerations of things contribute to making her the most vibrant character but also a bit ridiculous (a nice hat?—then again, Freud would have a great time with this list, hat included). Ortberg undermines and mocks marriage here as he does elsewhere, whether in his text-message version of Jane Eyre or in stories in a later collection, The Merry Spinster.

It is suggestive too that Beth’s scene comes right after Jo has enumerated with dismay the things and activities that Meg declines to have at her wedding, and Jo says, “i’ll kill myself and all of you / but i won’t live in that world,” that world without nuptial fireworks (123). 15 As if on cue, Beth literalizes Jo’s extravagant metaphor—she won’t, indeed, live in that world. The prosaic things of the ordinary world kill Beth, in effect, but the extraordinary things that Jo imagines give her life. If text messaging can dematerialize things and humans, Ortberg’s hats and horses and Jo reinscribe materiality and life. Yet, admittedly, that life is partly deflecting loss (of Meg to marriage, for instance) and is at the expense of—metaphorically kills—other characters. The reductive listing of things with which she associates Brooke helps to objectify him, to thingify him, much like enumerations in connection with her father (the greatcoat and riding boots and “shaving things” that he will undoubtedly want back when he returns, too bad) and also with Professor Bhaer (the mustache and crumbs that make him undesirably desirable).

Ortberg’s mimicking of text messages evokes some of the aura of real ones (if what is digital can be conceived of as real), in addition to generating an aura of their own. 16 We may be inclined to read such messages rapidly, to read them as capturing fleeting rather than profound thoughts, to read them as distancing but also enabling intimacy, and, of course, to read them—and hence the fictional characters who send and receive them—as very modern.

Ortberg’s “Little Women” thus draws on and is implicated in text messaging, but is it, ultimately, a short story? I would argue that it is—even if it pushes against the expectation of the unity of effect (as indeed many stories do), not even gaining the thematic unity of a juxtapositional plot. In a discussion of Twitter stories, Elke D’hoker has argued that the brevity of the short story may make it easier for “hybrid forms to emerge,” noting that the genre “has joined . . . forces with that of the letter, the haiku, the epigram and the essay”

15. Jo’s threat to kill is another moment in the text that startles me. Alcott’s Jo would not make such a threat, unless she is acting in a melodramatic play, but modern adolescents, or Ortberg’s 37-year-old Hamlet, might.16. See Hutcheon on how adaptations are not just reproductions but can have a Benjaminian aura, “carry[ing] that aura with them” (Adaptation 4).

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(18). 17 And now—text messaging. 18 As with parody, hybridity that merges high and low art can democratize the form of the short story.

“Little Women” enacts further hybridity by incorporating elements of the drama, for it foregrounds the visual and consists of dialogue. 19 V. S. Pritchett may refer in passing to the short story as having “the dramatic compression of the theatre” (31), but theorists have focused more on its relationship with either the novel or poetry. 20 Ortberg’s drama-like narrative may not adhere to the three unities sometimes attributed to Aristotle—of time, place, and action—but few modern dramas do. Yet the visual presentation invites us to look at the words on the page, to decipher the format, not just treat the words as invisible carriers of meaning: the words perform a kind of visual spectacle. In addition, the story is entirely in dialogue. Jo’s shift in stance regarding marriage—from no, she will never marry, to her choice of a distinctly unromantic mate—enacts a comedic reversal or peripeteia. And the story is very much about performance, not least Jo’s performance of verbal extravagance. Indeed, “our online lives are all about performance. We perform on social networks” (Turkle 26), for we can craft our messages to be who we want to be.

Ortberg also underscores the dramatic aspects of his story through an early reference to a play that Jo is writing and that she wants Meg to perform in, in lieu of marrying Brooke: Jo claims that in her adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress Meg would miss out on a “cracking scene with the villain / Rodrigo,” to which Meg aptly objects, “I don’t remember anyone named Rodrigo in The Pilgrim’s Progress” (121). In Alcott’s Little Women the sisters perform a play by Jo that features a Don Roderigo; it does not purport to be based on Pilgrim’s Progress, unlike how Alcott’s novel as a whole presents itself, from its epigraph to chapter titles and other allusions (see Phillips, “Prophets” 213-36). Indeed, the twisting of Pilgrim’s Progress in Ortberg’s story echoes Alcott’s twisting adaptation of Bunyan’s work in her novel, even as it self-reflexively alludes to Ortberg’s enterprise of adapting that novel.

17. See also Lohafer, who points to how “[f]iction and nonfiction, narrative and anti-narra-tive, verbal and graphic media combine in hybrid texts” (“Short Story”). D’hoker goes on to argue that Twitter stories can combine the rhetorical devices of the story with those of poetry, specifically story’s narrativity and poetry’s segmentivity (17). Ortberg’s story does incorporate such poetic devices cited by D’hoker as the initial repetitions of anaphora and the stringing along of parataxis.18. Not that it is the first to do so. For a popular YouTube story that draws on text-message format, see Hough. See also Raftery; Crystal esp. 79, 85. 19. Alcott had grown up writing plays for family performances, and one of her strengths as a writer is her dialogue. There have, indeed, been scores of dramatic adaptations (see Clark, Afterlife 6-7 et passim).20. Also see Lepaludier and especially Collins, who argues that the roots of the American short story lie in performance, specifically theater and oral public culture.

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Ultimately, Ortberg’s “Little Women” is a spinoff, an adaptation, a parody, and a hybrid short story. Indeed, some have found it and the collection in which it appears hard to categorize. The Library of Congress classifies the book as fiction; Publishers Weekly, as nonfiction—as “charmingly captur[ing], in short, palatable bytes, what is most memorable about famous books and their indelible characters” (Review). Other reviewers describe it as “catnip for English majors,” or, more snarkily, as reducing “the classics of western literature . . . to the idiot poetry of textspeak,” or else as “the smartest, most highbrow, most sophisticated literary book that will ever make you pee yourself in public” (Washington Post, cited in Driscoll; Lezard; Fershleiser). For me, Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s “Little Women” does work as an adaptation, specifically a parodic spinoff, and as a short story, not least because it raises questions about both Alcott’s Little Women and the short story as a genre. The short story here morphs, becoming hybrid as it tries on the contemporary form of the exchange of text messages and itself adapts as it performs adaptation.

Beverly Lyon Clark Wheaton College, Massachusetts

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Ortberg, [Daniel] Mallory. Texts from Jane Eyre, and Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters. New York: Henry Holt, 2014. Print.

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Winther, Per, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, eds. The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004. Print.

Wright, Austin M. “Recalcitrance in the Short Story.” Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Eds. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. 115-29. Print.

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“Little Women” (2014) de Daniel Mallory Ortberg est à la fois une adaptation, une parodie, un produit dérivé et une nouvelle. En tant que produit dérivé, cette nouvelle soulève des questions sur le statut de tels textes (peuvent-ils exister indépendamment du récit qui les a nourris ?), notamment lorsqu’on s’attarde sur la réécriture que Ortberg propose du Little Women de Louisa May Alcott. “Little Women” introduit également des questions relatives à la nature même de la nouvelle. Par exemple, un récit bref doit-il vraiment avoir un « effet unique » ? En outre, le texte met en œuvre de manière efficace l’hybridité, composé qu’il est d’une série de messages écrits échangés par téléphone rappellant les dialogues d’un drame ; il s’interroge sur la relation entre l’intimité et la distance, et aussi sur la nature des choses.

ADOLESCENT SEXUALITY: BETWEEN DISCOURSES OF RISK AND RESISTANCE

Adolescence is a phase of identity formation and self-discovery. Many studies associate this phase with young adults’ sexuality. According to Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva, “for most young people, the quest for fully adult identity becomes, in the first place, an attempt to discover and accept their sexuality” (11). Sexuality will be understood here in Foucauldian terms as a “complex machinery for producing true discourses on sex” (68), discourses grounded in and channeled through institutions such as family, church, clinic and school and articulated around the value of truth (56). Since the 19th century, sexuality has been placed in an “ordered system of knowledge” (69) which is geared to a form of knowledge/power (58). The purpose of this contribution is to show that young adults’ sexuality has been subject to this knowledge and to what Foucault identifies as its underlying strategies of power (73).

Love and Sex 1 is an American theme-driven anthology of short stories edited by Michael Cart. The two themes announced in the title do not receive equal attention in the stories, as the main focus is rather sex. The stories capture episodes in the lives of adolescents grappling with their sexual

1. The anthology includes ten stories, but the present study will focus on seven of them be-cause of their unity of subject and form. Although “Secret Shelf,” like the other stories in the collection, deals with sexual issues, it will not be discussed in this paper because it is a short story in verse and its formal difference makes it difficult to study it along with the other short stories. “Snake” is about the date of two teenagers whose encounter has been arranged by their parents. The story is told by Lily and Adam, both of them first person narrators, relating the same experience from their own perspective as teenagers. “Troll Bumps” is about Grace’s obsessional first love and how she overcomes it.

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identity through experiences that range from homosexuality to abstinence, masturbation, transgender dilemmas, abortion and gender roles in various class, racial and ethnic contexts. The collection is subtitled Ten Stories of Truth and the back cover describes the stories as “heartbreakingly honest.” In the foreword, Cart states that they share a “courageous, non-judgmental commitment to telling the truth” (11). The editor’s statement can be read as the response of an expert of young-adult fiction, but may also be considered a marketer’s pitch to highlight the unique selling purpose of the book. Underlying the editorial statements, there is a truth claim that comes from the assumption that the narrative voice in these stories relates the experience of adolescents. Cart’s editorial voice seems to anticipate and fend off criticism that the stories in young adult fiction are told by an adult author masquerading through an adolescent narrative voice. Indeed, M. Cadden confirms that many adolescent fictions adopt this enunciative frame and yield “top-down (or vertical) power relation” (qtd. in Hill 18) driven by a didactic impulse. Hilton and Nikolajeva argue that narratives respecting this frame “are in fact not about what it is to be an adolescent but about what it might or should be” (8). The gap between the factual present tense “is” and the hypothetic conditional “might or should” reveals that the cultural landscape of adolescence oscillates between the actual and the imaginary. This complex imaginary includes a set of projections driven by commercial, ideological and socio-cultural interests. 2 The representation of the adolescent’s sexuality is governed by a similar duality. Lewis and Durand explain that the representation of sexuality is governed by risk and resistance patterns. The first pattern “explicitly link[s] sexual thoughts and actions with severe and dangerous consequences” (39), and aims to monitor adolescent sexuality. The second, “disrupts normalized understanding of adolescent sexuality by providing instances of youth fully aware and unashamed of their sexual thoughts and acts” (39). The outcome of these patterns is that “the representations of youth, therefore, more often reflect an adult perspective on how youth should live—through risk formulations—rather than on how youth could live—through resistance formulation” (39). The short stories studied here illustrate the overlapping of risk and resistance patterns.

This article will analyze the narrative frames and discursive patterns underlying the representation of adolescent sexuality in Sex and Love. First, the study of narrative strategies will reveal how the adolescent reader engages with the narrative voice and the discourses of sexuality that each narrative choice exposes. The second part will focus on the various contrasting discourses about sexuality that are internalized and/or questioned by adolescents. The narrative

2. The titillating title of the collection may illustrate the imaginary underlying the represen-tation of adolescent sexuality. First, “Sex” precedes “Love” to appeal to a hypersexualized market. Then, “Love” figures in the title to appeal to romance-seeking readers, although it plays a minor role in the different stories of the collection.

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and the discursive economy of these short stories will be read in the light of the narratives of growth (Entwiklungsroman). The objective is to show that as is the case in the Entwiklungsroman, the economy and epistemology of the short story are propitious to depicting the liminality characteristic of adolescent experience.

the naRRative PatteRn: engaging naRRatoRS

The Immediate Engaging Narration

Most of the short stories in Sex and Love are told by engaging first-person narrators. According to Andrea Schwencke Wyile, adolescent literature in general and the short story in particular use such narrators to secure a bond with the reader. Engagement implies the reader’s interest in and commitment to the narrative. Schwencke Wyile writes, “when one is ‘engaged by’ or ‘engaged with’ a narrative, one is involved in some form of identification that can lead one, temporarily to adopt, or take on, another persona; one is, at the very least, interested” (192). Engagement inscribed in the narrative leads to moral identification; it operates through two narrative devices: either a total conformity between the narrating-I and the narrated-I, also known as immediate engaging first-person narration; or a discrepancy between the narrating-I and the narrated-I, also known as distant engaging narration. The first reveals the narrated-I’s delusions, anxieties and feelings. The second, through an older and sometimes wiser first-person narrator reports and comments upon the focalizer’s experience. This may pave the way for a more didactic perspective.

A majority of the stories in Love and Sex resist the didactic impulse and try to depict a relatable experience by using immediate engaging narrators. Joan Bauer’s “Extra Virgin” is a romance that deals with the narrator’s choice for abstinence. Although the theme correlates with the discourse of risk, the enunciative framework describes an adolescent’s point of view. “Extra Virgin” is framed by an opening and a closing passage that use the diary form. This device is meant to build the illusion that the readers are discovering the narrator’s/protagonist’s thoughts as they unfold to her. The use of the present tense in a key moment, as when she first meets her lover, makes her experience seem even closer to the reader: “so I’m working the late shift at the Ice-cream Man Cometh. It is the first hot day of May and we’re busy . . . I’m smiling for the customers . . . I look up to see the growing line of ice-cream lovers and that’s when he walked in” (3). The narrator’s attempt at making the reader relate to her experience is further fostered by the repeated address to an implied narratee: “And you know what? I believe them, . . . if that is totally true, explain to me please, how anyone gets ever to college?” (2). Thus, the reader is carried by the narrator’s dreams and delusions since no narrative instance intervenes to judge or correct her vision. Indeed, the conformity between Beth the protagonist and

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Beth the narrator is such that her narrative does not undermine her delusion after the first date with Cal. When Beth says: “then he kissed my hand. I swear. And it wasn’t in a lame way; it was natural, like you would expect a steamy actor to do it and leave some poor girl in a blob in the street” (5-6), the narrator does not see the internal contradiction of her assumption. For the both of them, the stereotyped behavior of actors in love is the normal behavior that lovers in real life should have. To Beth’s deluded mind, Hollywood is the purveyor of normed behavior. The informational conformity of the narrator and the focalizer sets a narrative frame where the narrator’s point of view is presented as that of an adolescent unaware of her delusion. Indeed, it is not a random choice that the first meeting with her lover takes place at “The Icecream Man Cometh” shop, a vivid reminder of Eugene O’Neill’s play about delusions and pipedreams.

The total conformity between the narrator and the focalizer is best illustrated during times of crisis when the narrative echoes their linguistic deficiency. At the time Beth tried to explain to her friend her choice of abstinence, she could not find the words. She recalls: “I wanted to find the right words, like they had in the brochures that I read at school, where couples had great conversations about this and no one ever got hurt” (Bauer 13). Although the protagonist fails to voice her feelings within the diegesis, the narrator does not retrospectively come to her rescue with better formulations. The first-person narrator and the focalizer experience the same linguistic barrier that most teenagers face when dealing with sexuality. Indeed, based on studies in neurosciences, Nikolajeva underlines that some cognitive actions are underdeveloped among teenagers (87), and that to be plausible, an adolescent’s narrative must reflect their cognitive and linguistic development (91). This implies that the adolescents’ silence, and sometimes, their incoherent arguments are meant to single them out from the all-knowing posture of an adult narrator, thus making them more relatable for younger readers.

In Michael Lowenthal’s “The Acuteness of Desire” the simple style and weak logic of the narrative help to portray a narrator who is as inexperienced and deluded as the focalizer. Jess, the first-person narrator tells the story of his homophobic attitude toward Matt, who was randomly singled out by other children as gay:

At Richie Sander’s tenth birthday party, Matt Thompson showed us all that he was a faggot. He couldn’t help it; those were the rules. Before we started strip poker, Jed Simmons had proclaimed, “anyone who gets a boner is queer.” He was a fifth grader, and so we believed him. (129)

Although the narration takes place six years after the incident, the narrator privileges the focalizer’s perception with all the limitations and ambiguities that it incurs. Halfway through the story, the narrating-I sticks to the perception of the narrated-I and limits himself to describing the focalizer’s homophobic attitude:

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“Throughout junior high I was careful not to be seen near Matt. . . . Anyone who chose to be friends with a known homo would have to be suspect too” (130). However, when Matt joins Jess’s Math class, the latter wonders: “What had I done to deserve this? As soon as I asked myself, I knew” (134). The narrative economy investing this enunciation suggests that the narrating-I has no informational superiority or “cognitive dissonance” (Nikolajeva 92) over the narrated-I. The confession that follows reveals Jess’s repressed homosexual desire for Matt: “thinking of him in the shower, on the way to school, . . . wanting to do more than just think” (134). The total conformity between the narrator and the focalizer may be the result of the protagonist’s deeply anchored denial of his sexual orientation for fear of judgement and exclusion. It may also be the result of his incomprehension of a complex emotional situation.

This illusion of total conformity is also inscribed at a linguistic level. In fact, the narrator provides a vivid two-page description of the sexual encounter between Jess and Matt, although the experience elicits little comment. The narrator’s descriptive role is in keeping with the protagonist’s confusion, captured in the following comparison: “[the sexual encounter] was like the end of a plane ride, when your ears pop and you realize you’ve only been hearing half of everything all along” (148). The metaphor illustrates the confusion and the lack of understanding demonstrated by both the protagonist and the narrator, a confusion characteristic of the cognitive pattern of young adult narratives. Nikolajeva writes:

If lack of coherence is the very token of a young person’s state of mind, how can its narrative be sufficiently coherent to be understood by an outsider, that is, the reader?And yet, YA fiction attempts to convey exactly an adolescent’s inability to understand the world and other people; the confusion and anxiety of being young; the discomfort about the profound changes in mind and body. Fiction takes the challenge of representing a physiological and psychological condition through the only means fiction has—words. (89)

The immediate engaging narration, is one of the strategies that young adult fiction uses to make the adolescent reader engage with the protagonist’s overwhelming feelings of doubts and ambiguity. Andrea Schwencke Wyile explains that “the very point of these narratives is that by an ‘unquestioning identification’ with the narrator, the reader gets a fuller, or experiential, sense of the narrator’s experience than would be possible in a distancing narration” (197). In the case of “The Acuteness of Desire,” the effect is to foster the adolescent readers’ vicarious experience, by providing them with the reassurance that their phantasies, questions and doubts are shared by many young adults their age.

A similar reading effect is achieved through different narrative strategies in Chris Lynch’s “The Cure for Curtis,” the only story told by a third person narrator in the collection. Through internal focalization, the narrator describes

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the turmoil of a teenager who is afraid he might have become “gay” and sexually impotent overnight because of his recurrent same-sex phantasies. Other than illustrating a teenager’s loose knowledge about sexuality, the story reveals the guilt and shame that non-normative sexuality exerts upon him. The conformity between the narrating agent’s and the focalizer’s levels of knowledge leaves little space for didacticism. Instead, through a humorous take, the narrator lets the reader into Curtis’s day dreams, as he browses “his modest library of soft to medium-core pornography” (110) gazing at “image upon image, man upon woman. Upon woman. Upon man. Curtis swims in a sea of bodies, Caligula’s own pool of flesh. . . . Men on women on men. Women. Women on women on women. On Leonardo DiCaprio. On Lisa. . . . On Curtis” (110).

The vertiginous flow of images reinforced by the paratactic syntax mirrors the bewilderment of the day-dreaming teenager and engages the reader’s empathy through its humorous effect. Curtis’s point of view guides the narration because whatever fears and anxieties he experiences are either described through inner focalization or expressed directly (by himself). Actually, the story is related in the present tense, which adds an impression of conformity between the diegetic time and the narrative time, thus bridging the informational gap that may exist between narrator and focalizer. When Curtis is overwhelmed by shame and fails to explain his feelings, the narrative of his fear of sexual impotence is expressed extra-diegetically. A graphic blank slips on the page to separate the moment when he is hesitating to tell his fears from the moment when Lisa reacts to his worries. The ellipsis is in keeping with the narrative strategy of avoiding an all-knowing adult voice, able to word things that may be difficult for adolescents to express. True to this same enunciative logic, the only feedback Curtis has is formulated by Lisa, who tries to go beyond the right/wrong dichotomy and plays down the taboos by adopting a jovial reassuring attitude. To the wailing Curtis, Lisa says, “Shut up. Listen Mr. Freakish Pent-up. Everybody dreams” (122). So even if the story is told by a third person narrator, it is still engaging because it sticks to the adolescent focalizer’s point of view.

By entrusting the adolescents with telling their own experience, these short stories create an immediate engaging narration that fosters a bond between the adolescent narrators and the adolescent readers. Other than their cathartic effect, the stories make the adolescent reader engage with the character/narrator as they share the same dilemmas, lead the same struggles and confront the same difficulties. In an interview to Kevin Kenny, Robert Lypsite, author of young adult fiction says that “it is uplifting to know that there are other people who are facing the type of problems that you have to face. That’s the kind of role of YA literature” (Kenny 237). By creating a narrative frame where the adolescent takes over the narrative, these short stories symbolically create a space where the adolescent regains control over the power of language. When Lisa tells Curtis that she also has same-sex phantasies, she holds a discourse that challenges the normalcy/deviance dichotomy and relieves Curtis from his

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feeling of shame. Her part illustrates adolescents’ agency through language. Roberta Seelinger Trites, who relates power to the linguistic subject position, argues that power derived from language “not only acts on a subject, but in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being” (5). In the case of Curtis, his non-conforming sexual identity is “enacted into being,” made possible, thanks to his friends’ approving words. However, when the stories are told by a distant engaging narrator, relating the experiences of a former self, the adolescent’s narrative voice is permeated with the perspective of a grown-up.

Distant Engaging Narration

Emma Donoghue’s “The Welcome” is told by Luce, a distant engaging narrator, who relates from hindsight her complex and aborted crash on J.J., a black transgender, when she was eighteen. Living in a women-only coop, with feminists and minority-rights activists, Luce was an intellectual and gender-conscious teenager. However, she failed to notice that J.J. was transgender and mistook her loneliness and reserve for shyness. She noticed J.J.’s “wary, Bamby looks,” but could not relate it to the pain that a transgender adolescent has to go through in her daily life, hiding her sexual identity for fear of rejection. With the benefit of hindsight, the narrator remembers cues that showed J.J.’s skepticism about sex-based identities. For instance, she remembers J.J.’s muttering to herself “something that sounded like: ‘Bodies are an accident’” (204). Whether the sentence was really J.J.’s or a wishful reminiscence formulated by the grown-up Luce, it expresses her awareness that sex does not determine gendered identity. The narrative does not go into a pompous explanation of the gender-as-construction theory, though this is the underlying message of the story—Emma Donoghue, commenting on her story, says that it is about “the walls of identity that can keep people apart” (224). Instead, the narrator contents herself with a fleeting reference and avoids a discourse about sexuality that a teenager, like Luce, is unlikely to express or to relate to. Even if the diegesis portrays the lack of knowledge of young Luce, it is not to underestimate her maturity but to emphasize how complex the transgender experience is. In fact, what comes as a conclusion in the last paragraph of the story, is that some situations may go beyond our grasp no matter the age. Indeed, the adult narrator revisits her adolescence “any time [she catches herself] thinking [she knows] the first thing about anything” (223). This declaration seems to undermine age-oriented accusations by revealing the lack of knowledge inhering not only in the teenagers’ but in the adults’ own position. Although distant, the narrator can still be related to because she suspends any top-down didactic relationship to her former self.

The adolescent’s voice is sometimes entangled with the discourses of the adults. “The Lightening Bringer” by Garth Nix, a fantastic narrative told by a sixteen-year-old first-person narrator, is suffused with contrasting views about

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sexuality. Next to the promises of pleasure, adolescent sexuality is presented as monstrous, deadly and abject. The narrator draws a parallel between himself and a supernatural creature he calls the Lightening Bringer, that literally gets sexual powers by connecting with the lightening and charms girls into a deadly sexual encounter. Ever since he was ten, when he saw the Lightening Bringer seduce Carol, he has become obsessed by him: “I thought about him for the next six years. After I got interested in girls, I think I thought about him every five minutes. I tried not to, but I couldn’t just shake the memory of how Carol had looked at him. I wanted a girl like Carol to look at me like that, and do a whole lot more besides” (51). Although shrouded in ellipsis, the last sentence reveals that the narrator is conscious of his hidden sexual phantasies and hints at his awareness of the verbal taboos around sexuality at the time of narration. The declaration exposes the emotional and linguistic control that he operates on himself and points to the breach between the younger desiring self and the older controlling self.

This breach is expressed when the narrator confesses his guilt at his uncontrolled sexual drives. In fact, overwhelmed by sexual desire for his girlfriend Anja, he felt as monstrous as the Lightening Bringer: “‘I’m just like him,’ I whispered, remembering when I wouldn’t stop kissing her, remembering the feel of the Power, wanting to use it to make myself irresistible, to slake its lust and my own on her, make her just a receptacle for pleasure” (57; capitals in the original text). The pairing of sexuality and power reveals the narrator’s awareness of a power dynamics underlying sexuality, which is unlikely to be expressed from a teenager’s point of view. Unlike Luce in “The Welcome” who adopts an adult’s point of view without adopting a negative perspective about adolescents’ sexuality, the narrator in “The Lightening Bringer” presents sexual drives as difficult to control, a source of nausea, shame, guilt and fear. Actually, associating sexuality with a monstrous creature makes sexuality a fearful matter with perilous results awaiting those who cannot control it. Though the story carries a warning against uncontrolled sexual urges, it also values the narrator’s pleasure at harnessing it.

Both distant and immediate engaging narrations implement narrative strategies that invite the reader to relate to these adolescents’ experiences and points of view while fending off an adult judgmental view. Entrusting teenagers with telling their own stories is part of a choice that aims at empowering adolescents. However, steering the narrative should not be equated with mastering the discursive power.

diSCouRSeS about Sexuality

Teenagers in Sex and Love are confronted with a spectrum of contrasting discourses about adolescent sexuality that range from the liberating to the

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repressive. Institutions such as family, church, clinic, and school warn against the dangers of sexuality using different discursive strategies. On the other hand, the American market is predicated on teenagers, who have a marked interest in sexuality.

In “Extra-Virgin,” the mother stands for the authority figure in charge of dispensing a regulating discourse about sexuality. When she wants to talk Beth out of having sex with her boyfriend, she brings her the album of photographs from when she was a baby and the box that contains her baby teeth. The move shows the mother’s desire to keep her daughter in the imagined place of a child. She also uses the scientific discourse about reproduction to warn her daughter about unwanted pregnancy. By asking her daughter repeatedly to tell her about her dates, she embodies symbolically the role of the figure of authority in situations of confessions. Foucault points that, while people are encouraged to speak about sex, this does not give the speaking subject the power over his or her speech. Instead, the interlocutor in the situation of a confession is “the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile” (61-62). Beth’s mother stands for this authority. Beth’s description of her mother’s inquisitive eyes, looking at her “with X-ray vision when she comes back from a date” (Bauer 7), reveals her awareness that her sexual life is under adult’s surveillance. Actually, this surveillance seems to be internalized by Beth herself. When her mother starts her warning phrase, “I just want to remind you of how these things—,” Beth finishes “—can backfire” (7). The mother’s warning discourse is internalized and repeated by the teenage girl—needless to underline, the verb “backfire” correlates sexuality with pain and suffering. Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that “sexuality is inseparable from language; it is influenced by and even constructed by words that people think and say. Thus, sexuality in this genre (young adult literature) is discursive and ideological” (85). While sexuality was controlled by the religious discourse—which labeled it sinful—and by the medical discourse—which labeled it a sickness—the educational discourse adopted mainly by schools and parents presents sexuality as detrimental to the adolescent’s social life. “Backfire” seems to equate the sexual experience to that of a battleground with all the dangers, hurts, damages and casualties implied by such a comparison.

In Sex and Love, the religious discourse against sexuality haunts the characters’ conscience and language. For instance, when Beth is about to have sex with her boyfriend, she is held back by a “catholic upbringing, which basically taught you that at any moment, day or night, no matter where you are or what you were doing, three nuns would jump on the scene and start screaming at you” (Bauer 9). As in a Foucauldian panopticon, the teenagers are held prisoners of a discourse that makes them operate some kind of self-repression to avoid any behavior that might run against the established codes of conduct. For instance, Curtis in “The Cure for Curtis” considers his

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homosexual dreams as sinful; he regards himself as an animal for daring to nourish these phantasies. However, for some teenagers this language is only rhetorical. In “Fine and Dandy” (Louise Hawe), Casey’s friend confesses to the priest that she “sinned by wanting to do the same lustful things [Casey] had done” (33). However, to Casey’s reproachful reaction, she explains: “that’s church talk” (33), thus implying her contrapuntal appropriation of the religious discourse. Actually, other adolescents are aware that the religious discourse against sexuality is part of a discourse against pleasure. In “The Watcher” (Angela Johnson) the adolescent narrator draws a tight link between the discourse against sexuality and the religious suspicion against pleasure. He/she says: “My grandparents are serious Christians who think that if it feels too good, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And that includes food and movies” (189). Even if adolescents refer to the religious discourse, they also distance themselves from it and use it either parodically or analytically.

Some stories of Sex and Love show that sexuality is regulated by a medical discourse that classifies the normal and the abnormal by referring to non-conforming sexual behaviors as deviant, or sick. The title of the short story “The Cure for Curtis” makes the reader wonder what disease Curtis is suffering from and what cure will heal him. Indeed, Curtis finds his homosexual phantasies “sick” and his cousin tells him that a “good beat” will be the only “cure.” The two teenagers’ reactions sum up the spectrum of discourses around non-conforming sexuality as behaviors that should either receive clinical handling or a form of punishment. In “The Acuteness of Desire,” Matt describes his homosexual experience as “sick” (Lynch 155), while his friend considers it a “divine punishment” (133). The medical and the religious discourses operate in a similar way by situating homosexuality as a temporary flaw that the individual has to fight. David Bergman notes: “all three of the ways in which patriarchy has conceived of homosexuality—as sin, crime, and disease—place it within frameworks that deny it permanence, since sins may be overcome, crimes avoided, and diseases cured” (qtd. in Seelinger Trites 109). Adolescents can either take the medical discourse for granted or question it. The diegesis in “The Cure for Curtis” undermines the medical discourse by showing that Curtis’s behavior is not an abomination, but that it relates to an orientation shared by many teenagers. Corrine M. Wickens explains that when “‘smart’ people understand that being gay is no big deal . . . homophobic attitudes, behaviors, and individuals are renounced” (151). However, the diegesis in the “Acuteness of Desire” points to the destructive effect of this discourse. The story ends with the metaphor of an ambient virile landscape: the young narrator being rushed and knocked by a team of football players. Even if Jess is still confused about his sexual identity, the narrative works up a system of empathy on his behalf and frames the virile team of football players who

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“stampeded out” and “trampled everything” as a metaphor of a unidirectional rigid normative group. 3

The risk discourse also targets teenage heterosexual relations. Teenagers in Sex and Love are often haunted by the fear of being victims of sexually transmitted diseases. For instance, Beth in “Extra Virgin” explains that “all the facts about teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases scared [her]” (Bauer 2). On the other hand, Casey had sex with Pratt because they were both virgins and “didn’t worry about AIDS” (Hawes 22). The ghost of sexually transmitted diseases, a major leitmotif of the risk discourse, haunts teenagers.

Next to all these institutions that warn against the dangers of adolescent sexuality, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the fashion industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the service sector are all for a blooming teenage sexuality as long as it sells well. The teenager finds himself somewhat torn between two contrasting discourses about his sexuality: the first is infantilizing and the second is fetishizing. The narrator of “Extra Virgin” remarks that her brother and her cousin spend their time watching a TV show about “bikini-clad, big busted blondes who hang-glide” (Bauer 1). As she goes down the street, she walks past

the magazine stand displaying X-rated covers. Past a poster of a model in underwear flagging down a taxi. Past a big sign that read JUST DO IT. Past a movie theatre placard with a man and a woman kissing passionately underneath the grabber headline THEY COULDN’T SAY NO TO THE FIRE THAT RAGED WITHIN THEM. (16)

While one character spends his time “browsing his modest library of soft to medium-core pornography” (Lynch 110), another compares a classmate to a character from the erotic magazine Penthouse. The narrator of “Fine and Dandy” obtains a pregnancy test “the kind advertised on late-night TV,” finds the address of the abortion services in the phone directory and remarks that “anybody can look it up, can shop for it like a hair salon or an Italian restaurant” (Hawes 33-34). The ease with which an abortion service is provided rips it from all the drama with which it is associated. While schools, families, churches warn against sexuality, sexual productions are everywhere (TV, magazines) making sexuality a banal topic. The institutional discourse against sexuality contrasts with the market’s strategy that uses sexuality as a tool and target to appeal to teenagers.

3. Corrinne M. Wickens explains that one of the strategies used in LGBTQ young adult litera-ture to undermine heteronormative assumptions about sexuality is the creation of a system of empathy for the non-conforming young adults and the “framing of individuals with homo-phobic attitudes as being in the wrong” (152).

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The different narratives in Sex and Love show teenagers grappling with completely contrasting discourses: one that aims at liberating sexuality, the other at controlling it. Far from encouraging one discourse or another, the short stories reveal how the characters negotiate their identity formation in the light of these discourses. The narratives expose the way discourses about sexuality are embedded and implicated in a wider identity and gender politics.

identity ConStRuCtion thRough inteRnalization oF oR ReSiStanCe to inStitutional diSCouRSe about adoleSCent Sexuality.

Teenagers may either internalize the discourses against sexuality, and therefore develop fear, guilt, homophobia, anxiety, alienation, denial; or call them into question and expose their internal incoherence. Sex and Love shows that the two patterns often overlap in the same narrative.

Discourses of Risk Internalized

The internalization of the discourse against teenage sexuality is best illustrated by the language and the narrative structure of “The Lightning Bringer.” Indeed, the narrator crafts a tale in which the narrated-I is struck by a sexually empowered supernatural creature called the Lightning Bringer. Whether out of fear or out of denial, the narrator prefers to distance the narrated-I from sexual agency by making us believe that his sexual desires are the result of a supernatural effect. The Lightening Bringer, like Prince Charming, kissed him on the forehead and “fire flamed through his skull” (48). Through a detour by the uncanny, the narrator circumvents self-censorship to justify the protagonist’s sexual awakening. Yet this awakening is marked by its monstrosity. Indeed, unable to control his powerful sexual desires for his girlfriend Anja, the protagonist comes close to raping her. Then, overwhelmed by the fear and shame of his predatory drives, he operates an unexpected reversal. He fights the Lightning Bringer, kills him and renounces his sexual drives. The narrative structure follows a traditional coming of age pattern in which the male hero restores order and adopts the right behavior. The home-away-home structure is illustrated metaphorically through his metamorphosis into a sexual “monster” and his restoration of his original self. Consequently, the narrative structure ends up reinforcing the discourse against uncontrolled adolescent sexuality.

In “The Acuteness of Desire,” the narrator internalizes the discourse against homosexuality to the extent of denying his homosexual drives and developing a homophobic attitude. The narrative underlines the existence of a power differential whereby straight boys have the power to diminish gay boys. This power differential is expressed discursively and kinetically. First, when

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Jess the narrator and his classmates decide that Matt is gay, they start chanting “fa-gott! fa-gott!” (130), a pejorative taxonomy that verbally excludes its signified. Then, “throughout junior high [Jess] was careful not to be seen near Matt” (130). The exclusion comes full circle, since the Other is quarantined by being literally left alone. Paradoxically, the same power differential is enacted by Matt when he discovers that Jess is gay. The role reversal shows how deeply anchored are the fears of being sexually non-conforming. The striking thing about these two teenagers’ experience is that guilt and shame stun them beyond language. Indeed, neither of them is able to name his sexual identity. While the narrator describes the sexual encounter with Jess in length, he is short of words when it comes to expressing his feelings about this encounter, let alone understanding how it has shaped his subjectivity. It is true that the sexual encounter is characterized by a rhetoric of pleasure, which depicts this experience in a good light and fends off the shadows of repression for a while. However, the rejection that follows and the inability to accept one’s identity reveal the devastating effects of internalizing a demeaning discourse about homosexuality.

The discourse against non-conforming gender identity is also internalized by J.J., the transgender in disguise, who keeps her identity secret for fear of rejection. Corrine Wickens considers the hiding metaphors, ranging from the closet metaphor to the coming out, as illustrations of the fear that sexually non-conforming subjects endure. J.J.’s dressing code (wrapped up in her huge white flannel dressing gown, as usual) and almost permanent silence express this fear. Despite her awareness that her identity is not determined by her sex, she doesn’t have the courage to come out. When her flat mate asks her at what age she became aware of systemic racism, J.J. “muttered something that sounded like ‘Bodies are an accident’” (204). Her remark may be read as an allusion to the body-gender agreement fallacy, a fallacy that has congealed anatomy into destiny. The fact that this remark is only muttered or almost said to herself reveals the repression she is operating over herself out of a fear of incomprehension and rejection. Actually, J.J. literally retreats from discourse and the only time she speaks about her gender is in a monologue in the form of a non-return letter.

Secrecy, disguise, hiding are all signs of the internalization by young adults of a discourse of shame targeting non-conforming sexual identity. Worse than internalization, it is alienation that can often be read in the linguistic choices of the characters. For instance, Luce, a lesbian teenager herself, is unable to describe a non-conforming identity in words other than the demeaning words of a patriarchal discourse. This is all the more astonishing as she is often described as keen on linguistic precision. Thus, she is wondering if J.J. is a “Butch” or a “Dyke” (Donoghue 204-05), failing to notice, or disentangle herself from, the negative rhetoric about sexually non-conforming subjects. These discourses against sexuality affect teenagers

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differently however: many of them try to negotiate their place in a social order whose rules they are not ready to comply with.

Questioning the Discourses About Sexuality

Most of the short stories in this collection embody a youth lens perspective that “divorces sexual awareness from a prescribed teen-age” and “reacts against the pervasive sex-gender order” (Lewis and Durand 47-49). This perspective is propitious for questioning the institutional discourses about sexuality. For instance, some stories in this collection expose the linguistic and didactic deficiencies of the institutional assumptions about adolescent sexuality. The narrator of “Extra-Virgin” downplays her mother’s authority by mocking the “Bad videos” featuring a “dancing sperm” and “gyrating eggs” that her mother uses to explain sexuality. The narrator’s mocking description not only undermines the logical appeal of an adult authority figure, but also points to the deficiencies of a scientific discourse that limits sexuality to its biological dimension. Contrary to the clear-cut truths of the scientific illustrations, the narrator’s experience is existential and one that calls upon identity issues. “I was feeling things I had never felt before, feeling terribly mature, and pretty young at the same time,” she says (6). Her declaration shows that she is in a phase of identity construction that cannot be explained through her mother’s scientific discourse. Instead, it is a discourse of pleasure that reconciles adolescents with their contrasting feelings. The narrator of “The Watcher” is a teenager who goes through the same experience as Beth, although he reacts to it differently. He concludes: “if you do it right, you can make it an art form (feeling good). You can just set your time aside and watch life as a big pleasure palace” (Johnson 189). The positive rhetoric about sexuality imbues the narrative with such a sensuality that it simply overturns whatever threatening message a teenager can hear about sexuality.

The medical institution is also questioned for its blindness to the difference between gender and sex. The transgender heroine of “The Welcome” is a telling illustration of Judith Butler’s theory that “there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (34). Indeed, reiterating the minimal social markers of femininity, J.J. is accepted in the women-only co-op and lives there incognito for months. Later, J.J. reveals that she has been refused surgery because she does not conform to the stereotypical cultural codes of femininity: “the body I’ve got is mostly wrong still, and the Doctors won’t give me the operation because they say I’m not serious enough about wanting it. According to their classifications, I should wear make-up and tights and get a boyfriend. I have to keep telling them that’s not the kind of woman I am” (Donoghue 221-22). Her letter illustrates her awareness of the essentializing role of the “epistemology of the visual” that equates sex and gender (Wiegman;

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qtd. in Trites 47). Even if J.J. does not reveal her transgender identity publicly, her message denounces the institutional deficiencies and the social codes that regulate people’s bodies and determine a random sex/gender agreement, based on arbitrary semiotic codes. By standing outside the semiotic order, J.J. offers the readers an alternative option for identity claims and challenges the normed views of sexuality.

A similar thought about gendered roles runs through “Fine and Dandy.” On her way to get abortion, Casey fights against the myth of the maternal instinct, denouncing it as a cultural construct. She remarks:

if my life were a movie, there would be a fade-out here; the screen would go dark and you’d never know for sure what I decided. . . . My life is not a movie; it is just life. So, I went through the whole thing, from start to finish. There was no dramatic scene where I thought things over, jumped up, and ran out of that room, determined to raise my baby against all odds” (38).

Casey’s remark shows her awareness of the cultural productions that frame the identity construction of women as potential mothers. This shows that the maternal instinct is nothing but one of those gender roles that have been reiterated until they “congeal[ed] over time to produce the appearance of a substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 45).

Casey not only undermines the maternal instinct myth but also questions gender roles. Indeed, she goes as far as to wonder why she hasn’t envisaged the option of having her boyfriend assume the role of a single father (40). By doing so, she questions gender roles and brings to the surface the option of a single adolescent father. Her narrative challenges the reader to think outside the binary gender constructions.

These different narratives offer an empowering reading experience, best illustrated at a meta-textual level by the character of Casey. In fact, Casey explains that reading Madame Bovary taught her that she should not be playing a role that is not hers, only to fit in a social framework: “Emma Bovary talked herself into marrying her country doctor, but she didn’t have my advantage. She didn’t know how much she was going to regret it” (Hawe 27). Because she has knowledge (narrative knowledge), Casey has developed the power to decide. Her strategy corresponds to what Christina Rose Dubb terms the adolescents’ ability to “use literacy to read the world around them as a text and therefore help them to form their own identities enough to ultimately find authority in telling their own stories” (219). A reader of Madame Bovary, Casey gave up the security of having a boyfriend and opted for the demeaning position of a “wallflower” to avoid being entrapped in a role she does not like. Her experience as a reader foregrounds her choice and her identity formation. Dubb explains that adolescents can re-envision their previous experiences—and among them reading experiences—meld them into their present and

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imagine through them their future (221). She concludes, using the words of Guezzetti and Gamboa, that “literacy work is identity work” (221).

Just as Madame Bovary acts as an empowering narrative that convinces Casey to be true to herself, Casey’s narrative may play the same role for young readers. As George Horell points out, “the knowledge acquired by the reader’s vicarious experience becomes a source for transgressive and transformative possibilities” (47). It is no surprise that, in her post-abortion dreams, Casey sees herself as a storyteller. Only when she has this vision of herself as storyteller does she realize that other options are possible beyond the established gender-role divide.

Far from encouraging adolescents’ sexuality or warning against its dangers, most of these short stories expose the identity politics in which adolescent sexuality is constantly embedded. The narrative economy of the short story in this collection portrays the adolescents’ negotiation rather than accommodation with these different discourses and institutions. This makes young adult fiction comparable to the epistemology of a narrative of growth.

The Narrative of Growth v. the Narrative of Maturity

The narrative and discursive economy of the stories that we have examined so far shows that these stories follow the pattern of a narrative of growth. According to Trite, narratives of growth (the Entwicklungsroman) and the narratives of maturity (the Bildungsroman) are two narrative patterns with two different epistemological and ideological groundings. The Bildungsroman follows the protagonist’s education into a phase of maturity and acceptance of social codes and roles. On the other hand, the Entwicklungsroman, by ending before the protagonist has achieved adulthood and maturity, shows the protagonist’s conflict and negotiation with authority. Trite concludes that “most young adult novels are Entwicklungsromane” (19) because the genre “interrogates the social constructions foregrounding the relationship between the society and the individual” (Trites 20).

It is true that the concepts of Entwicklungsroman and Bildungsroman apply to the novel, yet the Entwicklungsroman and the short story converge at some levels of their narrative and epistemological economy. For instance, the Entwicklungsroman and the short story operate in similar temporal frameworks. By focusing on episodes of the protagonist’s life, the Entwicklungsroman comes close to the narrative economy of the short story. More particularly, it bears a strong similarity with what Mary Louise Pratt calls “moment of truth stories [which] focus on a single point of crisis in the life of central characters, a crisis which provokes some basic realization that will change the character’s life forever” (Pratt 99). Every short story studied in this paper covers a “single point of crisis” and depicts the way this crisis makes the adolescent question his or her environment and identity. Beth’s desire for abstinence, Casey’s decision

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to have abortion, Curtis’s doubts about the consequences of his onanism, Jess’s discovery of his homosexuality and Matt’s denial of his, the narrator’s encounter with his wild sexual urges in “The Lightening Bringer”—all these fleeting experiences have profound consequences on the adolescents’ identity formation. The narrative depicts their turmoil and conflicting emotions at that specific moment of crisis. The temporal frame does not expand beyond the moment of crisis because as Nadine Gordimer points out, in the short story “[a] discrete moment of truth is aimed at—not the moment of truth, because the short story doesn’t deal in cumulative” (265). In spite of, or probably because of, its limited temporal scope, the narrative of the short story provides enough space to reveal the protagonists’ existential doubts and questions.

By focusing on a moment in an adolescent’s life rather than describing his or her maturation, the narrative economy of the short story and the Entwicklungsroman fosters a willing suspension of conclusiveness. Indeed, the time span afforded by the short story makes it difficult to portray the protagonist’s maturity and a significant shift in point of view. For instance, at the end of “The Acuteness of Desire,” Jess is left without cues as to Matt’s denial of the sexual experience they had. The “Cure for Curtis” ends up with the beginning of Curtis’s sexual education, as he tries to find out if onanism is common among girls too. The suspension of conclusiveness is also expressed typographically through the question marks that recur through the closing passages of “The Lightening Bringer” and “Fine and Dandy”. Another sign of inconclusiveness can be seen in the suspension of the identity shift. For instance, when Cal tells Beth that he accepts her decision for abstinence she says, “[t]his was sounding a lot like the brochure they’d passed out in school. I searched his face like my mother searched mine” (16). The reference to the origin of the words and the inquisitive gaze is a sign of the identity doubling that the two teenagers are undergoing. Their older self is no longer the same: now they can use the words of brochures whereas a week ago those words were beyond reach; now Beth is scrutinizing her boyfriend, expecting a confession, whereas a few days before she was criticizing her mother’s X-ray gaze. Though their resort to the tools of the adults (language and gaze), the teenagers do not feel empowered. Instead, their simulation of the adults is almost parodic and shows that they consider these tools alien to them. They are straddling two positions and comfortable with none. This liminal condition is at the heart of both adolescence and the short story. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman underline that

On account of its very brevity and often episodic structure, the generic liminality of the short story privileges the depiction of transitional situations and fleeting moments of crisis or decision. The liminality of short fiction as an aesthetic and generic phenomenon goes along with liminality in short fiction, which emerges as moral, cultural, and political crises resulting from the clash of different normative systems. (22)

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The stories in Sex and Love emphasize the adolescents’ interrogations rather than the accommodation with normative systems implied by their education into adulthood. Different discourses about sexuality are brought up and questioned. The discursive economy of the young adult short story as studied in the second part of this essay reveals the contrasting discourses with which the protagonists are trying to cope. No single discourse is championed; instead a poetics of liminality and suspension of conclusiveness marks the different stories.

The narrative and enunciative strategies in the stories of Sex and Love show that the short story is propitious for capturing the experience of young adults. It is not simply because its shortness enables it to “snare the short-attention-span” of young readers (Campbell 16). It is because the narrative and epistemological economy of the genre allows for a more realistic depiction of moments of crisis and wondering, to which kindred spirits will relate. The brevity of the short story, its limited time span, the tone sustainment that this brevity affords to the narrative, all these converge to inscribe into the short story a willing suspension of conclusiveness.

Karima Thomas University of Angers

WORKS CITED

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Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Campbell, Patty. Campbell’s Scoop: Reflections on Young Adult Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2010. Print.

Cart, Michael. “Foreword.” Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth. Ed. Michael Cart. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003. ix-xiii. Print.

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Donoghue, Emma. “The Welcome.” Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth. Ed. Michael Cart. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003. 195-223. Print.

Dubb, Christina Rose. “An Adolescent Journey: Finding Female Authority in The Rain Catchers and The House on Mango Street.” Children’s Literature in Education 38 (2007): 219-32. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge. History of Sexuality I. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1978. Print.

Gordimer, Nadine. “The Flash of Fireflies.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994. 263-67. Print.

Hawes, Louise. “Fine and Dandy.” Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth. Ed. Michael Cart. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003. 21-41. Print.

Hill, Crag, ed. “Introduction: Young Adult Literature and Scholarship Come of Age.” The Critical Merits of Young Adult Literature: Coming of Age. Ed. Crag Hill. New York: Routledge, 2014. 1-24. Print.

Hilton, Mary and Maria Nikolajeva, eds. Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture: The Emergent Adult. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Print.

Horrell, Georgie. “Transgression and Transition.” Contemporary Adolescent Literature and Culture: The Emergent Adult. Eds. Mary Hilton and Maria Nikolajeva. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. 47-59. Print.

Jochen, Achilles and Ina Bergman. “‘Betwixt and Between’: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian and British Short Fiction.” Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing. Eds. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergman. New York: Routledge, 2015. 3-34. Print.

Johnson, Angela. “The Watcher.” Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth. Ed. Michael Cart. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003. 183-91. Print.

Kenny, Kevin. “An Interview with Robert Lipsite.” Writers on Writing for Young Adults. Eds. Patricia E. Feehan and Pamela Petrick Barron. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1991. 237-43. Print.

Lewis, Mark and Sybil Durand. “Sexuality as Risk and Resistance.” The Critical Merits of Young Adult Literature: Coming of Age. Ed. Crag Hill. New York: Routledge, 2014. 38-54. Print.

Lowenthal, Michael. “The Acuteness of Desire.” Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth. Ed Michael Cart. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003. 129-56. Print.

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Lynch, Chris. “The Cure for Curtis.” Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth. Ed. Michael Cart. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003. 109-26. Print.

Nikolajeva, Maria. “Memory of the Present: Empathy and Identity in Young Adult fiction.” Narrative Works: Issues, Investigations, & Interventions 4.2 (2014): 86-107. Print.

Nix, Garth. “The Lightening Bringer.” Love and Sex: Ten Stories of Truth. Ed. Michael Cart. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003. 45-57. Print.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994. 91-113. Print.

Schwenke Wyile, Andrea. “Expanding the View of First-Person Narration.” Children’s Literature in Education 30. 3 (1999): 185-202. Print.

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Wickens, Corrine M. “Codes, Silences, and Homophobia: Challenging Normative Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary LGBTQ Young Adult Literature.” Children’s Literature in Education 42 (2011): 148-64. Print.

Cet article analyse la représentation de la sexualité des adolescents dans le recueil de nouvelles Sex and Love (ed. Michael Cart, 2003). Partant de la définition de Michel Foucault de la sexualité en tant que discours qui produit et gère la sexualité, cette contribution analyse les stratégies narratives mises en place pour représenter différents discours autour de la sexualité. Ces discours révèlent un imaginaire culturel qui conçoit la sexualité dans un schéma binaire tantôt encourageant la sexualité, tantôt décriant ses dangers. Les nouvelles étudiées soulignent ce schéma mais représentent des adolescents qui le remettent en question en interrogeant les tabous autour la sexualité et les normes genrées. La politique de liminalité de la nouvelle s’avère propice à la représentation de ces moments de questionnement. L’économie narrative et épistémologique de la nouvelle permet d’inscrire une suspension volontaire de conclusion qui serait le reflet de la condition de liminalité psychologique de l’adolescent.

PART THREE

SHORT STORIES

“LA FAMILLE”: AN UNPUBLISHED SHORT STORY IN FRENCH BY EDITH WHARTON

Despite being fluent in French from an early age and choosing to live the last three decades of her life in France, biographers generally agree that when it came to writing fiction in French, Edith Wharton’s only published effort was her decidedly unsuccessful “Les Metteurs en Scène,” a short story which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in October 1908 (Lee 303; Lewis 234). 1 Furthermore, whilst “Les Metteurs” is not a straightforward translation of another English story of hers (as in the case of her French version of “Atrophy” (1927) entitled “Atrophie” and also published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in July 1929), it is generally recognised as a reworking of her 1905 story, “The Introducers” and therefore does not constitute a wholly new story composed specifically for a French treatment. 2The discovery of “La Famille” amongst her unpublished papers at the Beinecke library at Yale changes this picture of Wharton’s fiction output in French. The undated typescript, complete with handwritten revisions, constitutes the first four sections, and a short extract from the fifth, of the tale of a rich, young, orphaned American woman engaged to a titled Frenchman. This story does not, to my knowledge have any clear English language counterpart within Wharton’s oeuvre. The choice to write in

1. Henry James responded to “Les Metteurs” by congratulating her on “the way in which you’ve picked up every old worn-out literary phrase that’s been lying about the streets of Paris for the last twenty years, and managed to pack them all into those few pages.” He was to later acknowledge that it was “[a] very creditable episode in her career. But she must never do it again” (A Backward Glance 183-84).2. In 1907, Wharton began writing a story in French as an exercise for her French teacher in Paris. This was to become the seed of Ethan Frome (1911), a novella written in English (Lewis 296).

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French suits the Parisian setting of the story, as well as the subject matter of a Franco-American alliance. However, such narrative features can also be found in some of her English language fictions, such as the 1906 novella Madame de Treymes, her short story “The Last Asset” (1904), and her novel The Custom of the Country (1913), which begs the question why she wrote this particular story in French. An answer could lie in a close reading of the text itself and what this suggests of her intended reader—the typescript is multilingual; it regularly contains phrases in English (these are underlined in the original and the translation) and rests on the assumption of a reader fluent in French, with a secure knowledge of French culture, as well as a certain fluency in English language and literature—a line is quoted from Hamlet in the story. Wharton’s use of deixis (“those”/“ces”) in her phrasing furthers the sense of a shared understanding between a cultured writer and the reader. An example of this is in a reference to the works of the painter Hyacinthe Rigaud. Wharton writes:

La marquise rappelait elle-même un de ces beaux tableaux dans lesquels Rigaud a fixé les traits nobles et sévères des douairières de son époque.

The Marchioness resembled one of those fine paintings in which Rigaud displayed the noble and severe characteristics of the dowagers of his age. (Translation)

The multilingual and cosmopolitan nature of the text, with references to Falconnet clocks and French salons, combined with Wharton’s deictic phrasing suggests that this story is written for a reader not unlike Wharton herself, who would chuckle knowingly at her satirical vision of both American and French mores. The story’s focus on the young American, Nina Alston, and the narrative distancing of her French fiancé and his family suggests that this reader too could have an American perspective, or perhaps simply the same sort of “cosmopolitan expatriation” Blazek references in his account of Wharton’s position in France. Blazek notes that “for Wharton in her time the condition among the haut bourgeois implied experience essentially of Europe, aesthetic sensibilities across a range of literary and cultural traditions, a refined sense of cultivated taste and manners, and the means and most likely the family heritage to acquire these qualities” (277). However, whatever the intended reader’s affiliation, neither the French nor the American characters (save Nina Alston) in this story escape her satirical brush and the use of French combined with English interjections gives Wharton free reign to subtly twist her literary knife using the wide linguistic repertoire of two languages and their two associated cultural histories.

Wharton’s affiliation with France was such that Ricard argues it is possible to read her work as entirely governed by a French perspective, explaining that “France became Wharton’s frame of reference” (81). In probably her most well-known exploration of France and the character of its people,

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French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), Wharton applauds the French’s strict observances of protocol and their upholding of tradition. However, as Ricard notes (89), she also singles out “an instinctive recoil from the new, the untasted and the untested as characteristic of the Gallic mind” (French Ways 30). This “strong instinct to preserve” (31) and shying away from the new is a French trait ridiculed in “La Famille.” Nina’s prospective family-in-laws are presented as Old World snobs and the Egyptian mummy they have on display in their entrance hall reads as a symbol of their own metaphorical burial in the past. The gap between the French preservation of the old and the American love of the new is signalled by the visiting Americans’ response to the relic, as they comically wonder if it is “an ancestor—a crusader.” The exchange ends on the similarities between this museum object and their French hosts, concluding with the remark “[w]e will see many more of them in this world you are going to present to us,” as the Americans walk into the Brancade reception room. Whilst the American arrivals are ridiculed in the story, the French Brancade family appear to be even less sympathetically drawn, in terms of their snobbish, appalled response towards these admittedly garish individuals. Indeed, Wharton reminds the reader of an earlier Franco-American engagement, between Edna Frusk of Omaha and Jean de Montrieux, which fell apart when the unforgettable Frusk family made a visit to their prospective in-laws in Paris.

Wharton’s satirical description of Nina’s long lost American family group has a heavy focus on their clothing. The stepmother’s “chic hat of extraordinary shape,” “rather tired dress,” “well-used gilt metal purse” and “chinchilla muff, whose worn fur contained various large bald patches” remind the reader of her description of Medora Manson’s outfit in The Age of Innocence—a garment with “plaids and stripes and bands of plain colour disposed to a design to which the clue seemed missing” (97)—in the way that both accounts combine humour with a certain pathos. Equally arrestingly dressed, Mrs. Alston’s son (and Nina’s presumed step brother), Cesar, seems to have a well-developed ability to say the wrong thing, such as his remark “How come you haven’t installed electric light yet?” when given privileged access into the Brancade stately home, furthering the image of these American arrivals as a rather clownish, uncultured group of individuals (unlike the transnational Nina). Yet within this comedy, there is a certain admiration for the self-made Mrs. Alston, who began as a cable girl and has since, through the hard work evidenced in the wrinkles on her face, risen to the position of manageress of the local telephone exchange. Her first marriage was short lived, and it is implied that she inherited little if nothing on her husband’s death, and her second was more of a hindrance than a help to her financial stability. When Nina suggests that she cover the costs of their trip, Mrs. Alston blushes indignantly and refuses the offer. Whilst she is tactless, and an object of narrative ridicule, this middle-aged woman is a modern example of the American pioneer, self-made and independent, two qualities that would have appealed to Wharton.

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Above all “La Famille” is a playful story. Much of the comedy lies in Wharton’s wordplay—the matchmaker is called Madame Le Chercheux (of course, it would be in the plural). Mrs. Alston acknowledges that the surname of her second husband, Sprang, sounded ridiculous and she edited it from her offspring’s nomenclature the day after her divorce. Wharton gives a certain onomatopoeic quality to the name of the maid, the meek Miss Neff. And whilst there is not enough space here to explore the names Mrs. Alston gave her children—Augusta Germania, Nathalie of Serbia and Caesar Borgia Alston—the colourful backstories of their historical namesakes deserve recognition.

There is also a playfulness of genre here: Wharton is Wildean in her use of epithets and aphorisms, such as Mme Le Chercheux’s remark that “the absence of a large family is almost as valuable as the possession of a large fortune.” The regular salon setting for many of the exchanges in the story gives the narrative an Austenesque feel, in what appears to be a comedy of manners. The rather clumsy exposition at the opening of the story, when Nina refers to her lack of any living relative and upcoming marriage to a Marquis, combined with the regular focus on prosodic features of the characters’ speech suggest that this could have been written with the stage in mind. Apart from a brief reference to Diana, the central character, Nina, is relatively underdeveloped compared to those in Wharton’s other short stories, and if this were a study for a theatrical piece, it feels more pantomime than serious drama.

Given Wharton’s penchant for twists and surprise endings, it is a great shame that she either did not finish her story, or that the final pages have been lost. There is much to suggest that these four sections set the story up for a denouement, or a Whartonian reveal. There is a clear signalling that Nina would like to put her fiancé to some sort of test and the more I read this story, the more I think that Nina has found the ultimate test any Frenchman could be asked to endure: brash American in-laws. It would be simply a contest between his snobbery and his love for Nina. Furthermore, there are various clues in the text that this is a manoeuvre orchestrated by Nina to test her lover. Indeed, she tells Mme Le Chercheux that she “will have to invent some other [tests]” for her fiancé. Nina did not need to go to America for six weeks, so perhaps she went to arrange for her man over there to sort out a group of surprise arrivals who would play the part of a long lost family. It appears that he sends a group of actors (note the Hamlet quotation made by Mrs. Alston), which would also explain the refusal of any handout (they have already been paid for their services). Whatever she had planned for her conclusion, there was some twist awaiting.

Kate Wright translated the story (with thanks to Don Clark). Unfortunately, the shortness of this introduction means that Wharton’s stylistic choices in French cannot be given the detailed analysis they invite. Some grammatical elements have been adapted in an attempt to create the register of Wharton’s English language stories; Wharton’s heavy use of (generally

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present) participles to modify noun phrases in French have sometimes been substituted for a subordinate clause, or nominalised in the English version to lend the text a more natural feel. Wharton’s heavy use of punctuation is striking here and stands out given how concerned she was with this element of her printed texts. (She once wrote to her publisher to complain about the size of the spaces between her ellipsis points.) 3 Compared to her English language stories, “La Famille” contains an unusually large amount of comma splices and a significant use of semi-colons, particularly before conjunctions. And on a final note, some of her phrases simply do not translate well, such as the fiancé’s declaration, “‘Mais je chercherai, je trouverai, je la débarasserai malgré elle de cet horrible fardeau’” which awkwardly reads as “‘But I will search, I will find and I will relieve her, in spite of herself, of this terrible burden!’” However, we should remember that this was not written in English, or for translation into English and perhaps by doing so we are removing a central element of this story: its Frenchness.

Sarah Whitehead Independent Scholar

WORKS CITED

Blazek, William. “Wharton and France.” Edith Wharton in Context. Ed. Laura Rattray. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 275-85. Print.

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Vintage, 2008. Print.

Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print.

Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. London: Vintage, 1993. Print.

Ricard, Virginia, “Edith Wharton’s French Engagement.” The New Edith Wharton Studies. Eds. Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020. 80-95. Print.

Wharton, Edith. “The Last Asset.” Scribner’s Magazine 36 (August 1904): 150-56. Print.

---. “The Introducers.” Ainslee’s 16 (December 1905): 139-48; (January 1906): 61-67. Print.

3. Levy notes Wharton’s letter of complaint about the spaces between ellipsis points in the printed versions of her work (60).

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---. Madame de Treymes. Scribner’s Magazine 40 (August 1906): 167-92. Print. (Then in book form in 1907, published by Scribner’s.)

---. “Les Metteurs en Scène.” Revue des Deux Mondes 67 (October 1908): 692-708. Print.

---. Ethan Frome. New York: Scribner’s, 1911. Print.

---. The Custom of the Country. New York: Scribner’s, 1913. Print.

---. French Ways and Their Meaning. New York and London: Appleton, 1919. Print.

---. The Age of Innocence. 1920. Ed. Candace Waid.New York: Norton, 2003. Print.

---. “Atrophy.” Ladies Home Journal 44 (November 1927): 8-9. Print.

---. “Atrophie.” Revue des Deux Mondes 99.7 (July 1929): 375-88. Print.

---. A Backward Glance. New York and London: Appleton, 1934. Print.

LA FAMILLE UNE NOUVELLE D’EDITH WHARTON

i.

« Enfin vous voilà revenue de l’autre monde ! Quelle joie de vous revoir, ma mignonne ! »

Mme Le Chercheux, du fond de son fauteuil, contemplait avec une satisfaction presque béate la jolie personne de Miss Nina Alston, debout devant elle dans le petit salon fané, fripé, dédoré, où se faisaient, selon les racontars mondains, les plus grands mariages du monde franco-américain.

Américaine elle-même, jeune fille sans grosse fortune et presque sans beauté, Mme Le Chercheux avait commencé par se marier, on ne savait trop comment, avec un viveur ruiné, le baron Le Chercheux. Celui-ci, n’ayant fait qu’une bouchée de son modeste avoir, se sépara poliment d’elle, et après avoir lutté pendant quelques années contre une pauvreté noire, elle recueillit un petit héritage qu’elle n’offrit pas de partager avec son mari. Mais elle vivait surtout, disait-on, des mariages qu’elle faisait entre la noblesse française et la haute finance d’outre-mer. Ses propres infortunes ne semblaient pas lui avoir laissé de scrupules, et elle n’hésitait jamais à engager ses jeunes compatriotes à suivre son exemple, pourtant peu encourageant.

À ce métier passionnant mais incertain, elle essuyait de temps à autre de gros revers, et même, disait-on, des pertes matérielles : on parlait, par exemple, d’une ravissante jeune fille de l’extrême Ouest, qu’elle avait habillée, façonnée, lancée, à ses propres frais, et qui, un beau jour, avait planté là le gros financier choisi par sa protectrice pour s’enfuir avec un Tsigane de café-concert.

Cet accident, bien que survenu depuis quelques temps déjà, avait sérieusement nui à la réputation de Mme Le Chercheux, et celle-ci se plaignait

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amèrement qu’un seul mécompte eut pu faire oublier les multiples services qu’elle avait rendus à son pays d’adoption. Dans les milieux un peu fermés on se méfiait tant soit peu des héritières improvisées de Mme Le Chercheux, et les méchantes langues racontaient même qu’elle les faisait racoler sur les grands transatlantiques sans trop s’enquérir de leur origine ni de leur propre passé. Mme Le Chercheux, blessée dans son légitime orgueil, sentait qu’il fallait répondre à ces accusations en se faisant l’intermédiaire d’un mariage exceptionnel, d’une de ces éclatantes alliances où la dot de la fiancée vaut le blason du prétendant. Et c’est ce qu’elle était arrivée à faire en fiançant le Marquis de Brancade avec Miss Nina Alston. Non pas que la jeune fille fut d’une richesse fabuleuse, ni son fiancé de lignée royale ; mais la fortune de Miss Alston égalait la situation sociale de M. de Brancade, et tous deux étaient doués d’un caractère si sympathique que l’on était unanime à approuver leur union.

« Que je suis heureuse, ma chère petite, de vous revoir à Paris », répétait Mme Le Chercheux, en contemplant d’un œil ravi la jeune fille fraîche et rayonnante qui se tenait devant elle. « Mettez-vous là, près de moi, et racontez-moi comment tout s’est passé là-bas. Je ne dors sur les deux oreilles que depuis que je vous sais de retour. »

Miss Alston s’assit en souriant, et prit d’une main calme la tasse de thé que lui offrait son amie.

« Mais que redoutiez-vous ? Que je ne revinsse pas de l’Amérique, ou bien que Henri n’eût pas la fortitude de supporter les six semaines de mon absence sans me lâcher pour une rivale ? »

Mme Le Chercheux regarda le visage fin et moqueur de Miss Alston avec un léger mouvement d’impatience. « Mais qui sait, mon enfant ? Cela s’est déjà vu ! Vous êtes donc bien sûre de vous-même ? »

Miss Alston souriait toujours. « Comment l’entendez-vous, chère Madame ? Je suis sûre de ne pas vouloir épouser un monsieur qui est capable de m’oublier pendant une absence de six semaines – et c’est même un peu pour le lui prouver que je suis allée moi-même en Amérique, plutôt que de me remettre à mon homme d’affaires pour les arrangements nécessaires. »

Elle disait cela sur un ton enjoué, mais avec une nuance de fierté qui s’accordait bien avec la pose altière de sa petite tête de Diane du Primatice, où les cheveux d’un blond châtain se divisaient sur un front bombé, largement découvert.

Mme Le Chercheux haussa les épaules. « Ma chère, j’ai toujours cru deviner un petit coin romanesque dans votre caractère calme et énergique. Croyez-moi, par le temps qui court, c’est un luxe qui se paye assez cher. Mais enfin, puisque votre Henri est sorti victorieux de l’épreuve – »

Nina eut un geste sceptique. « Oh, quant à cela, je ne l’affirme nullement ! C’est moi-même que j’ai voulu éprouver. J’ai voulu voir si je serais capable de renoncer à ce mariage, si je découvrais, à mon retour, le moindre changement en lui, la moindre diminution de sa tendresse. »

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« Quelle folie ! Et comme je reconnais là les scrupules introspectifs de votre ascendance de la Nouvelle Angleterre ! Mais puisque tout s’est bien passé, du point de vue sentimental, contentez, je vous prie, ma curiosité matérielle, et racontez-moi si tout est aussi bien en règle du côté des affaires. »

« Je crois que oui. J’ai un excellent homme d’affaires, très dévoué et très intelligent ; et comme je ne dépends de personne, tout cela a été bien vite décidé. » Elle semblait ne s’intéresser que légèrement à ces questions financières qui tenaient une si grande place dans les préoccupations de Mme Le Chercheux.

« Je n’ai qu’un regret », ajouta-t-elle d’un ton rêveur, en tournant distraitement autour de son doigt la belle bague de fiançailles que le Marquis de Brancade y avait placé.

« Quel regret ? » demanda vivement Mme Le Chercheux, qui ne savait jamais quelles surprises cette jeune personne fantasque et volontaire lui tenait en réserve.

« Celui de ne pas être restée là-bas pour mon mariage, au lieu de revenir à Paris. Quand je suis retournée chez nous, dans notre petit village, où les miens ont vécu pendant tant de générations, j’ai regretté de ne pas avoir eu l’idée de me marier là, tout simplement, en robe de mousseline, comme ma grand-mère. »

Mme Le Chercheux eut un sourire forcé. « Cela eut été gentil, sans doute – et la pensée est charmante. Seulement, comme il ne vous reste plus de parents – »

La jeune fille poussa un gros soupir. « Ah, voilà – c’est cette isolation que je redoutais. C’est si triste d’être seule au monde comme moi ! »

« Fort triste, en effet, ma petite. Et cependant – qui sait ? – » Mme Le Chercheux paraissait réfléchir. « Les parents peuvent être plutôt gênants… surtout quand on se marie à l’étranger… »

Une vive lueur passa dans les yeux clairs de Miss Alston.« Vraiment… vous croyez ? Cependant, j’aurais pensé qu’une jeune fille

entourée, protégée par les siens, eut été plus à l’abri des critiques, des curiosités malveillantes – »

« Ma foi, cela dépend. Si l’on pouvait choisir ses parents ! Mais tenez – cette jolie Edna Frusk de Omaha… je vous en ai parlé ? Non ? Eh bien, figurez-vous, ma petite, que je l’avais presque mariée à Jean de Montrieux, quand elle a eu la funeste idée de faire venir toute la smala de là-bas – le père et la mère, les sœurs et les beaux-frères, le grand-père Frusk, et même une bisaïeule invraisemblable : tout un monde cocasse qui sentait à la fois les montreurs de fauves et l’Armée du Salut, et qui se rua d’un commun accord sur les pauvres Montrieux, demandant à être présenté à leurs amis, parlant d’acheter un hôtel à Paris, déclarant que le jeune ménage devait s’installer chez eux, à la française… Ah, certes, mon enfant », s’écria Mme Le Chercheux en se ravisant,

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« je ne soupçonne pas votre regrettée famille d’avoir ressemblé en quoi que ce soit aux Jason Frusk ; seulement – »

« Seulement, en fin de compte, vous n’en savez rien », interrompit gaiement la jeune fille, sans trahir le moindre ressentiment. « Et alors – »

« Et alors », fit la baronne, soulagée, « comme Henri de Brancade était précisément l’ami et le confident de Jean de Montrieux, et qu’il lui a donné pleinement raison – »

« Je comprends votre inquiétude. Mais rassurez-vous ! Vous savez que, par un étrange hasard, il ne me reste aucun proche parent. »

« Eh bien, franchement, je ne le regrette pas pour vous. Les parents les plus irréprochables peuvent ne pas plaire au mari – il y a là tout une source de désaccords en moins ; et j’ai souvent dit à mes jeunes amies que l’absence d’une nombreuse famille vaut presque la présence d’une grosse fortune. »

Miss Alston continuait à la dévisager d’un regard réfléchi.« Et vous croyez que Henri est de ceux qui partageraient votre avis ? » Mme Le Chercheux lui jeta un coup d’œil méfiant. « Est-ce que je sais ?

Sait-on jamais, du reste ? Je puis seulement vous affirmer qu’il conseilla à Montrieux de se défendre à tout prix contre l’envahissement des Frusk. Mais heureusement, petite méchante », ajouta-t-elle en souriant, « c’est là une épreuve à laquelle vous ne pourrez pas soumettre votre pauvre fiancé. »

La jeune fille fit une petite moue malicieuse. « En effet », répondit-elle en se levant, « il faudra que j’en invente d’autres. »

Et elle prit congé de la baronne.

ii.

Sur le seuil de l’appartement de Miss Alston, sa dame de compagnie guettait son retour.

Miss Neff, petite vieille fille douce et effacée, qui veillait tendrement sur sa jeune compagne, l’accueillit d’un regard agité en lui tendant deux cartes de visite.

« Ma chérie, cette dame est venue tantôt. Elle a beaucoup insisté pour te voir, et elle doit revenir dans une demi-heure. »

Nina entraîna Miss Neff dans son joli salon fleuri, plein de vieux meubles et de gracieux bibelots.

« Dans une demi-heure ? Mais je ne puis pas la recevoir. Vous ne devinez donc pas, ma bonne Neffie, que j’attends mon seigneur et maître ? »

Miss Neff rougit pudiquement. « Je lui avais bien dit, dearest, que je ne te croyais pas libre cet après-midi. – Mais regarde les cartes, je t’en prie. »

La jeune fille y jeta un regard négligeant ; puis elle eut un petit cri effaré.Sur la plus grande des cartes elle avait lu les noms suivants :

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Mrs. Hamilton AlstonMiss Augusta Germania AlstonMiss Nathalie S. Alston

Et sur la plus petite :

Caesar Borgia Alston

Miss Neff, les mains appuyées sur sa maigre poitrine, contemplait la jeune fille d’un œil inquiet.

« Eh bien – eh bien – qu’en dis-tu ? »Nina jeta les cartes sur la table. « Mais c’est fou ! Que veut dire ce nom

de Hamilton Alston – le nom de mon père ? Je n’ai que quelques cousins éloignés, et aucun d’eux ne porte ce prénom. »

« Et tu n’as jamais eu de frère, n’est-ce-pas ? »« Jamais. Ma mère est morte quelques semaines après ma naissance. »Miss Neff hésita ; puis elle dit timidement : « Mais ton père s’était

remarié ? »La jeune fille eut un vif mouvement de contrariété. « En effet, il a épousé,

trois ans avant sa mort, une jeune fille qui était demoiselle de téléphone dans le village voisin de notre propriété. Ce mariage a tellement offensé ma grand’mère que mon père, atteint déjà du mal qui allait l’emporter, est parti pour la Floride avec sa femme, et nous ne l’avons plus revu. Il paraît qu’elle l’a soigné avec beaucoup de dévouement, et je ne pense pas qu’il ait jamais regretté son choix. Mais comme tout cela s’est passé dans mon enfance – vous savez que j’avais à peine huit ans à la mort de mon père – et que ma grand’mère, vivement blessée dans son orgueil, n’a jamais voulu renouer sa relation avec lui ; je n’ai eu les détails de l’histoire que beaucoup plus tard, par mon tuteur, qui est mort depuis, lui aussi. »

Miss Neff, ajustant son binocle d’une main tremblante, relisait les noms sur les cartes.

« Mais alors – en supposant même que cette… personne… soit en effet la veuve de monsieur ton père, tous ces enfants ne peuvent pas être tes frères et sœurs – ? »

Nina partit d’un grand éclat de rire. « Ah, certes, non ! Mais, du reste, cette Mrs. Alston ne peut pas être mon ex-belle-mère, puisque celle-ci s’est remariée peu de temps après la mort de mon père. Elle a épousé, je crois, un commis-voyageur du nom de Sprang. Par conséquent elle ne peut pas s’appeler Mrs. Hamilton Alston. »

Miss Neff eut un soupir de soulagement. « Ah, tant mieux ! Alors nous avons sans doute affaire à la femme d’un parent tellement éloigné que tu en ignorais même l’existence – »

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« Apparemment. Et cependant j’en serais fort étonnée, car mon tuteur avait la passion de la généalogie, et je crois avoir fouillé avec lui tous les coins et recoins de l’histoire des Alston. »

Nina se retourna vivement au bruit de la porte qui s’ouvrait.« Mademoiselle », dit le valet-de-pied, « c’est la dame qui est venue

tantôt. »Nina semblait réfléchir ; puis elle dit : « C’est bien ; vous la ferez entrer

dans la bibliothèque. »Elle se retourna en souriant vers Miss Neff. « Restez ici, ma bonne

Neffie. Recevez M. de Brancade, offrez-lui une tasse de thé, et priez-le de m’attendre. Soyez aimable avec lui, mais avec décence. Défense formelle de flirter ! »

Elle effleura d’un baiser le front dégarni de la vieille fille, et se dirigea d’un pas léger vers la bibliothèque.

À peine en eut-elle franchi le seuil qu’une dame se précipita vers elle avec des cris entrecoupés de petits rires nerveux.

« My dearest child! My eldest daughter! Vous permettez, chère Nina, que je vous appelle ainsi ? »

Miss Alston eut un vif mouvement de recul. « Mais, Madame, il faudrait vraiment que je sache à quel titre… »

La dame se tamponnait les yeux d’un mouchoir fripé. « Mais comment ? Votre cœur ne vous le dit pas ? C’est vrai que vous étiez bien jeune… et que nous nous sommes peu vues. Mais jamais je n’oublierai ma charmante petite belle-fille. Ah, qu’il m’en a coûté de l’abandonner quand j’ai dû accompagner votre pauvre père ! »

Nina la contemplait d’un œil égaré. C’était une petite femme grasse et cependant ridée, avec une de ces figures molles et fripées où l’on découvre les traces d’une vague joliesse effacée par le lent travail des soucis médiocres. Ses grands yeux un peu fous étaient ombragés par une broussaille de cheveux d’un blond invraisemblable, sur lesquels était posé un chapeau « chic », de forme fantastique, qui contrastait avec la coupe démodée d’une robe passablement usée. D’une main elle tenait une bourse en métal dédoré, et de l’autre un manchon en chinchilla dont la fourrure pelée révélait de larges plaques de calvitie.

Nina la regardait toujours.« Expliquez-vous, je vous en prie. Seriez-vous vraiment la veuve de mon

père ? »La dame se redressa avec un regard offensé. « Vous doutez de ma

parole ? Ah, voilà un coup auquel je n’étais pas préparée ! »« Je n’ai aucune intention de vous offenser. Mais vous devez comprendre

que j’ai le droit d’exiger des preuves, des explications. » Nina lui indiqua un siège. « Asseyez-vous, je vous prie. Et dites-moi comment cela se fait que vous portez sur votre carte de visite le nom de Mrs. Hamilton Alston. La veuve de

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mon père s’est remariée peu de temps après sa mort. Elle s’appelait Mrs. Hiram Sprang. »

La visiteuse se laissa choir dans un fauteuil avec un gros soupir. « Hélas, oui – c’est ainsi que je m’appelais autrefois, et je comprends maintenant votre étonnement. J’aurais dû vous expliquer dès le début que j’avais repris le nom de votre cher père. »

Miss Alston eut un petit cri d’indignation. « Vous avez repris son nom ? Mais pourquoi – et de quel droit ? »

Mrs. Alston enleva un gant défraîchi et s’essuya les yeux. « Vous formulez votre question d’une façon blessante ; mais je ne veux

pas l’entendre ainsi. Quand vous saurez tout, my dear child, vous prendrez un autre ton. » Elle se livra à ses pleurs avant de reprendre. « J’ai eu, en effet, une histoire bien navrante, bien tragique. Le malheureux auquel j’ai accordé ma main en secondes noces ne méritait pas d’avoir pour femme celle qui avait était l’épouse d’un gentilhomme. Ah, quel contraste entre votre père et son successeur ! Vous vous souvenez des paroles d’Hamlet à la Reine ?

Look first upon this picture, then on that…Hiram Sprang était un être sans délicatesse, et dépourvu de toute

éducation sociale. Je m’en suis aperçue trop tard, hélas ; mais après quelque années d’une existence insupportable pour un cœur raffiné, j’ai divorcé de Mr. Sprang, et afin d’effacer le souvenir de ma funeste erreur, j’ai repris le nom de Mrs. Hamilton Alston. »

Nina la regardait avec effarement. « Mais – pardonnez-moi si je vous le demande – de quel droit l’avez-vous repris, ce nom ? »

L’autre la toisa avec une noble fierté. « Du droit qu’a toute mère de faire ce qu’elle peut pour assurer et améliorer le sort de ses enfants. Je ne voulais pas que les trois innocents que j’avais mis au monde, fussent affublés du nom obscur et ridicule de Sprang ; et, le lendemain même de mon divorce, je les ai mis sous l’égide de votre beau patronyme, qui avait été un instant le mien. »

Comme Nina, muette d’étonnement, ne répondait pas, elle continua son explication dans un flux de paroles incohérentes. « Je n’avais qu’un rêve pour ces chers petits êtres – c’est qu’ils fussent, eux aussi, dignes de porter ce nom. Je les ai élevés dans la vénération de votre famille, de vos traditions de raffinement et de culture. Je leur ai constamment parlé de leur chère sœur aînée, de cette belle et douce Nina dont ils devaient faire la connaissance un jour. Je voulais surtout que mes deux filles fussent dames – je voulais qu’elles eussent un idéal, et c’est vous que je leur ai posée en exemple… Quant à la richesse, j’y suis indifférente… mais je veux, j’exige pour mes petites l’influence d’un milieu distingué. Tenez – leurs noms vous feront comprendre ma pensée. Toutes deux ont été baptisées de noms de reine – Augusta Germania, c’est l’Impératrice d’Allemagne. Je lui ai envoyé la photographie de ma petite, toute nue, le biberon à la main… Nathalie S., c’est Nathalie de Serbie… j’ai envoyé à sa majesté une mèche des cheveux de sa petite protégée, avec une dent de

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lait… tenez, j’ai ici une charmante lettre de sa dame de compagnie… Oh, vous comprenez, moi je ne puis vivre que dans l’idéal… Mais pour mon unique garçon j’ai voulu le nom d’un lutteur, d’un man of action, et je l’ai nommé César Borgia – j’adore tellement l’Italie ! Ses sœurs l’appellent Borgie – vous l’appellerez ainsi, n’est-ce-pas, ma chère Nina ? »

À travers cette succession de phrases décousues, coupées de parenthèses et d’envolées lyriques, Nina finit par deviner tout un passé pénible et laborieux, l’existence d’une jeune femme romantique mais courageuse, chargée de trois enfants, et continuellement aux prises avec de dures nécessités matérielles. La fortune de Nina Alston lui venait de sa mère, et son père, en mourant, n’avait pu léguer à la seconde Mrs. Alston qu’une mince portion. Celle-ci, fourvoyée avec ses enfants dans une de ces petites villes du Sud où les occasions d’avancement sont assez rares, avait cependant réussi, grâce à un travail effréné, à envoyer son fils au collège, et à donner à ses filles ce goût de l’oisiveté élégante dont rêvent pour leur progéniture les parents laborieux.

« J’ai voulu que mes deux petites fussent artistes, et elles le seront. Augusta a des goûts littéraires très prononcés – elle collectionne les autographes – et Nathalie, qui a une belle voix de soprano, chante déjà dans le chœur de notre temple, tout en se préparant pour l’opéra. Quant à mon fils, c’est un socialiste… » Elle sourit avec fierté… « Oh, je ne partage pas ses vues... comme toutes les femmes d’esprit distingué je suis conservatrice, traditionaliste – mais enfin, le socialisme est très bien vu en ce moment-ci – c’est ce que vous appelez chic, n’est-ce-pas ? » Elle continua son récit en expliquant, qu’ayant lu dans les journaux américains la nouvelle des fiançailles de Miss Alston, elle s’était décidée à emmener ses enfants en France afin qu’ils pussent faire connaissance avec leur belle-sœur, et assister aux fêtes qui seraient sans doute données au moment du mariage. « Cela m’a paru une occasion propice pour révéler à mes filles les chef-d’œuvre artistiques du vieux monde, et leur faire jeter en même temps un rapide coup d’œil sur cette société élégante dont je leur ai si souvent parlé… »

Nina écoutait avec une surprise croissante. Malgré tout ce qu’il y avait de ridicule et d’incohérent dans le discours de sa belle-mère, la jeune fille croyait deviner en elle une espèce de droiture foncière qui ne permettait pas de douter de sa sincérité. Et cependant elle se demandait si cette femme, qui manquait évidemment de ressources, avait vraiment entrepris le voyage en Europe dans le seul but d’assister avec les siens au mariage d’une inconnue, quitte à s’en retourner ensuite pour reprendre sa vie habituelle ? N’était-ce pas plutôt une aventurière astucieuse, qui avait risqué ce déplacement coûteux dans l’espoir que sa riche belle-fille se chargerait de l’avenir de ses filles ?

Nina hésita ; puis elle dit avec une nuance de froideur : « Si vous êtes vraiment venue de si loin pour assister à mon mariage, vous me trouvez très touchée par une démarche pour le moins… fort inattendue ; mais permettez-

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moi de vous demander franchement si vous n’aviez pas autre chose en vue – si, enfin, vous songez à vous fixer à Paris ? »

Mrs. Alston eut un geste de dénégation souriant. « Hélas, non. Je me sens faite pour les jouissances sociales et artistiques du vieux monde ; mais pour le moment je ne crois pas que cela soit possible. Il faut même que je rentre chez nous le plus tôt possible – je ne vous ai peut-être pas dit que je dirige le bureau de téléphone de notre ville ? Nous avons eu, depuis quelque temps, un grand renouvellement de prospérité industrielle, et ma situation est devenue assez importante, et par conséquent assez bien rétribuée. Grâce aux mêmes circonstances, mon fils a pu se placer dans la direction des chemins de fer, et lui aussi gagne largement sa vie. C’est ainsi que nous avons pu réaliser notre rêve de tant d’années, et nous permettre cette belle excursion en Europe ; mais il faut que nous nous embarquions dans deux semaines. En attendant, nous aurons vu beaucoup de belles choses, et nous rentrerons chez nous chargés d’inoubliables souvenirs et de rêves exquis… »

Elle prononça ces paroles sur un ton simple et fier, où ne se révélait aucune trace de l’exaltation grotesque de ses premières confidences.

Nina fut confondue par cette réponse si franche et si loyale ; et elle sentit le désir de réparer immédiatement l’injustice qu’elle avait commise, en sa pensée, envers son étrange visiteuse.

« Mais ce voyage a dû être très coûteux. Si vous me permettez de vous parler franchement, comme une parente enfin, je voudrais bien vous offrir de me charger des frais de votre visite… » balbutia-t-elle.

Une rougeur subite monta aux pommettes ridées de Mrs. Alston, et elle leva une main chargée de bagues en « toc », comme pour imposer le silence à sa belle-fille.

« Je vous en prie… je suis très touchée de ce que vous venez de me dire… mais ne mêlons pas de considérations matérielles au bonheur idéal de cette réunion… » Elle se leva vivement, en remettant ses gants reprisés. « Non, non, vous ne m’avez pas offensée… je vous suis même très reconnaissante de votre pensée... et je vous amènerai mes enfants demain puisque vous y consentez… mais nous sommes très capables, mon fils et moi, de subvenir aux frais de notre petite fugue. »

iii.

Trois jours après, Mme Le Chercheux entrait en coup de vent dans le joli salon de Miss Alston.

« Ma chère enfant, je sors de chez Mme de Brancade, et j’avoue que je ne comprends pas trop ce qu’elle vient de m’apprendre. »

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Nina l’accueillit en souriant. « Asseyez-vous donc, chère amie. Voulez-vous que je vous débarrasse de votre étole ? Non ? … Que vous a dit la mère de Henri ? » demanda-t-elle de son air calme et réfléchi.

« Mais je ne sais trop… j’en suis encore toute ahurie. Elle m’a parlé de l’arrivée imprévue de toute votre famille – moi qui vous croyais seule dans le monde ! – d’une belle-mère, de deux belles-sœurs… »

« Et d’un beau-frère, César Borgia Alston ; c’est tout à fait exact », répondit Nina, qui s’assit derrière la table à thé et se mit à en verser une tasse pour la baronne.

« C’est exact ? C’est exact ? » balbutia celle-ci. « Mais alors comment cela se fait-il que vous vous croyiez sans proches parents ? »

« Parce que j’ignorais l’existence de cette famille. Je savais, naturellement, que mon père avait épousé en secondes noces, la demoiselle du téléphone de notre village ; mais tout cela s’est passé dans ma première enfance, et comme il est parti immédiatement pour la Floride avec sa femme, et qu’il est mort sans en revenir, je n’ai jamais été très précisément renseignée sur ses dernières années. »

« Et tout ce monde vous tombe des nues sans que vous ayez eu le moindre soupçon de leur existence ? Mais c’est fabuleux – c’est incroyable ! » s’exclama Mme Le Chercheux, de plus en plus exaspérée.

« Les choses se passent souvent ainsi chez nous. Notre pays est si grand… il faut s’attendre à toutes les surprises », reprit paisiblement la jeune fille.

« Seigneur ! Et vous avalez celle-ci sans broncher ? Vous êtes d’une force, ma chère ! Vraiment, je vous en félicite… »

Nina leva les sourcils avec un petit air d’étonnement.« Mais ce sont d’excellentes gens, je vous assure ! Que ne me félicitez-

vous plutôt d’avoir retrouvé une famille à la veille de mon mariage ? Moi qui me plaignais l’autre jour d’être si seule au monde ! »

« D’excel lentes gens… d’excel lentes gens… », grommela Mme Le Chercheux… « Cela se peut bien, ma petite ; mais au fond, vous n’en savez rien, puisque ce sont des étrangers pour vous… et puis… et puis… »

La jeune fille l’interrompit d’un geste péremptoire. « Vous vous trompez, chère Madame. Ce sont mes plus proches parents et j’entends qu’on les accueille comme tels ! »

La baronne la contempla d’un œil navré. « Ma pauvre Nina, vous divaguez, tout simplement. Quels droits ont-ils sur vous ? Si encore c’étaient des gens de votre monde – présentables, comme on dit chez nous ! »

Nina se redressa. « Et qui vous a dit qu’ils ne le sont pas ? Est-ce Mme de Brancade, par hasard ? Et comment le saurait-elle, puisqu’ils ne lui ont pas encore été présentés ? »

« Pas encore ? Mais comment donc… Vous allez vraiment les conduire chez les Brancade ? Oh, ma pauvre Nina ! ... »

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Le visage de la jeune fille s’était assombri. « Parlez franchement, je vous en prie. Puisque Mme de Brancade n’a pas encore fait la connaissance de ma famille, c’est évidemment à son fils qu’elle doit les renseignements que vous tenez d’elle. Qu’est-ce que Henri lui a donc dit ? Voilà ce qu’il m’importe de savoir ! »

Mme Le Chercheux hésita, visiblement gênée. « Voyons, ma petite… vous ne prétendez pas que ce soient des gens du monde ? »

« Nullement. Mais je vous répète que ce sont d’excellentes gens ; je m’en suis assurée avant de les présenter à mon fiancé. Du reste, ce n’est qu’en fréquentant le monde qu’ils en apprendront les usages ; et il me semble que c’est un peu mon devoir de leur en donner l’occasion. »

« Seigneur ! » soupira la baronne.« Enfin », répéta la jeune fille, « qu’est-ce que Henri a dit à sa mère ? »« Oh, quant à cela, mon enfant, je n’en sais rien. Mais je viens vous

implorer de ne pas exiger que Mme de Brancade invite votre belle-mère au dîner de famille qui doit avoir lieu la semaine prochaine. »

« Ah – c’est là la commission dont elle vous a chargée ? »« Au contraire. C’est moi qui ai pris sur moi de vous avertir du danger

que vous courez. »Nina éclata de rire. « Danger ! Voilà un mot bien formidable ! Mais Henri

a donc été tout à fait épouvanté par les miens ? Chère Madame, je vous suis reconnaissante de me l’avoir appris ; car tout en le voyant un peu déconcerté par l’extérieur de ces braves gens, je ne le soupçonnais pas de redouter leur contact à ce point-là. Enfin, me voilà fixée, et je saurai me conduire en conséquence. »

Mme Le Chercheux se leva avec un geste désespéré. « Ma bonne Nina, réfléchissez… ne vous entêtez pas ! » implora-t-elle ; et à la porte du salon elle s’arrêta pour jeter à la jeune fille, dans un dernier cri : « Souvenez-vous des Frusk, je vous en conjure ! »

Nina ne répondit que par un vague sourire, où s’affirmait la volonté inébranlable de toute une lignée de lutteurs ; puis elle se retourna sans reconduire son amie.

Sur le seuil de l’appartement, Mme Le Chercheux se heurta contre un jeune homme mince et brun qui venait de sortir de l’ascenseur. Elle s’arrêta et lui saisit les deux mains.

« Ah, mon pauvre Henri – mon pauvre cher ami ! »M. de Brancade la contempla avec un sourire narquois.« Vous les avez vus, chère Madame ? »« Non – mais je sors de chez votre mère. Elle m’a raconté vos

impressions, et vous me trouvez accablée, anéantie… Rien à faire avec Nina pour le moment – cette enfant a trop bon cœur ! Mais je chercherai, je trouverai, je la débarrasserai malgré elle de cet horrible fardeau ! »

Le jeune homme lui serra les mains. « Je sais que nous pouvons compter sur votre amitié. En attendant, je cherche une solution de mon côté. Et savez-

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vous ce que je viens faire ici ? Prier Nina de la part de ma mère d’amener toute la famille chez elle ! »

Mme Le Chercheux eut un cri d’épouvante. « Comment ? À l’hôtel de Brancade ? Pour le dîner de famille ? Mon cher Henri ! Y songez-vous ? »

M. de Brancade fit un geste de dénégation. « Non. Ma mère tient à faire leur connaissance sans tarder davantage, et elle désire leur offrir une tasse de thé demain, dans l’intimité. »

« Demain – demain – », balbutia la baronne, effarée.Il la regarda avec son fin sourire. « Vous ne devinez pas ? Mais ne

croyez-vous donc pas que Nina, quand elle aura présenté ses beaux-parents à ma famille, reconnaîtra d’elle-même qu’il vaut mieux, pour elle et pour eux, qu’ils ne fassent pas partie du dîner ? »

Mme Le Chercheux le regarda d’un œil attendri. « Dieu le fasse, mon cher ami ! Votre idée est géniale – mais Nina est d’un entêtement incroyable ! »

iv.

La Marquise douairière de Brancade habitait, rue de Lille, un majestueux hôtel entre cour et jardin.

Tandis que Nina Alston, fine et rose dans son costume d’une sobriété voulue, précédait les siens à travers les dalles sonores du grand vestibule, elle entendit derrière elle une exclamation extasiée. Elle se retourna, et vit Mrs. Hamilton Alston plantée devant la haute vitrine où se dressait fièrement une momie emmaillotée, rapportée d’Égypte par le feu marquis, explorateur et archéologue distingué.

« Ciel, c’est un ancêtre – un croisé, sans doute ? Accourez, mes enfants ! Augusta, César, Nathalie, regardez cet être préhistorique, qui doit être le premier des Brancade ! »

Le valet-de-pied qui précédait le groupe s'arrêta avec une mine ahurie, et Nina dit en souriant : « C’est une momie, je crois. »

« Une momie ? » reprit César Borgia, gros garçon joufflu et gouailleur. « Dans ce cas-là, ne nous attardons pas. Nous en verrons bien d’autres dans le monde auquel tu vas nous présenter. »

Mme de Brancade attendait ses hôtes dans le grand salon du premier étage où elle se tenait entourée de son fils et de sa fille aînée, la Comtesse de Pontange. Assise dans sa bergère, sous le portrait en pied du grand Maréchal de Brancade, la marquise rappelait elle-même un de ces beaux tableaux dans lesquels Rigaud a fixé les traits nobles et sévères des douairières de son époque. Elle accueillit Nina avec bonté, et sa famille avec une politesse sous laquelle se dissimulait à peine un étonnement qui frisait l’épouvante.

Mrs. Hamilton Alston, en l’honneur de la visite, portait une robe claire, de fraîcheur douteuse, et un chapeau encore plus extravagant que celui qu’elle

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avait arboré en se présentant chez Nina. Augusta et Nathalie, jeunes filles malingres et pâlottes, qui semblaient vouloir compenser l’insignifiance de leurs personnes par la sonorité de leurs voix, s’étaient affublées de la même façon ; mais le chapeau mou et le petit veston à carreaux de César Borgia paraissaient proclamer son mépris démocratique pour les conventions sociales.

Tandis que sa mère et ses sœurs se confondaient en révérences devant Mme de Brancade et sa fille, le jeune César tapa son futur beau-frère amicalement sur le ventre ; puis il se jeta dans la bergère que venait de quitter la douairière, et dit en regardant autour de lui : « Comment – vous n’avez pas encore installé la lumière électrique ? »

Mme de Brancade ne parlait que quelques mots d’anglais, mais son fils et Mme de Pontange possédaient si bien la langue qu’une conversation suivie s’engagea bientôt entre eux et les jeunes Alston. Quant à Mrs. Alston, qui déclarait avoir emporté au collège le premier prix de français, aborda hardiment la douairière dans un jargon qui ressemblait un peu à la langue que parlent les Anglais comiques sur la scène parisienne.

Elle commença par lui dire combien elle se sentait heureuse de se trouver sur un pied d’intimité dans un de ces salons de l’aristocratie française qu’elle connaissait si bien par les mémoires et les romans historiques ; puis elle se mit à raconter son histoire à elle, en insistant beaucoup sur ses goûts artistiques et littéraires, et sur ce « raffinement » inné qui l’avait poussée, malgré toutes les vicissitudes de sa carrière, à se faire une place, pour elle et ses enfants, parmi les « aristocrates de la culture ».

La douairière, toute gênée de se trouver perchée sur une petite chaise volante, tandis que le jeune César se prélassait dans sa moelleuse bergère, écoutait avec un étonnement croissant les confidences de Mrs. Alston, tout en jetant de temps à autre un regard inquiet sur le Marquis de Brancade. Ce fut presque un soulagement pour elle quand Augusta Germania, se levant subitement avec un gros éclat de rire, s’avança vers elle en lui tendant un album.

« You must give me your autograph, you sweet old thing! » dit la jeune fille d’un ton câlin ; et comme Mme de Brancade la contemplait d’un œil ahuri, elle ajouta, en se retournant vers le marquis : « Henri, donnez donc une plume à votre mère. Vous savez, ce sont surtout les titres que je collectionne. J’ai trois Comtesses dans mon livre, et il faut absolument que j’aie une Marquise ! »

Mrs. Alston contempla fièrement sa fille. « Ah, Marquise, vous ferez mieux de vous exécuter ! Quand il s’agit de ses autographes, rien ne rebute ma petite Augusta, et grâce à sa persistance elle en a déjà formé une collection unique. Tenez, dernièrement, sur le paquebot, il y avait une baronne qui se tenait enfermée dans sa cabine, à cause de son grand deuil – elle venait de perdre son mari. Eh bien, ma petite n’avait justement pas de baronne, et elle ne s’est pas laissée décourager. Elle a emprunté le bonnet et le tablier de la stewardess et s’est faufilée dans la cabine – »

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Nina Alston se leva sans laisser achever sa belle-mère. « Je crains que nous ne retenions trop longtemps Mme de Brancade », dit-elle de son ton calme et souriant ; « et du reste j’ai promis à César que nous jetterions un coup d’œil sur les Invalides en passant. »

v.

Trois jours s’étaient écoulés depuis la visite des Alston à la Marquise de Brancade.

Nina Alston se tenait dans son coin accoutumé, derrière la table à thé de son salon doucement éclairé et embaumé de fleurs printanières. En face d’elle, son fiancé, appuyé contre la cheminée, tourmentait d’une main nerveuse les petits bibelots de jade posés entre deux sveltes flambeaux qui accompagnaient une belle pendule de Falconet.

Depuis quelques instants les deux jeunes gens se taisaient, et le visage assombri de M. de Brancade indiquait assez clairement…

Edith Wharton

Editor’s note: This unfinished story was found in the Edith Wharton Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (YCAL MSS 42). Except for minor editorial emendations to enhance readability, Wharton’s spelling, punctuation, and underlining have been retained. Typographical errors have been silently corrected.

LA FAMILLE A SHORT STORY BY EDITH WHARTON

i.

“At last you’ve returned from the other world! What a joy to see you again, my sweet!”

Mme Le Chercheux, from the depths of her armchair, contemplated with near blissful satisfaction, the pretty figure of Miss Nina Alston, who was standing before her in the faded, tired, lacklustre parlour where, according to society gossips, some of the grandest Franco-American marriages were made.

An American herself, and once a young girl without much fortune or much beauty, Mme Le Chercheux had begun by marrying, one wasn’t exactly sure how, a ruined reveller, Baron Le Chercheux. This man, having made short work of his modest assets, politely separated from her, and Mme Le Chercheux, after having fought for some years against abject poverty, gathered a small inheritance which she did not offer to share with her husband. She made a living mostly, it was said, from the marriages she arranged between French nobility and wealthy overseas families. Her own marital misfortunes did not seem to have left her with any qualms, and she never hesitated to encourage her fellow young compatriots to follow her example, however inauspicious.

In this exciting yet uncertain occupation, she suffered real setbacks every so often and, even, it was said, material losses: people talked, for example, of a delightful young girl from the Far West, whom she had dressed, fashioned and launched, at her own expense, and who had, suddenly, ditched the big financier chosen by her protectress, to run away with a cabaret Gypsy.

This accident, although it happened some time ago, had seriously damaged Mme Le Chercheux’s reputation, and she complained bitterly that a

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single miscalculation had made people forget the numerous favours she had done for her adopted country. In somewhat exclusive circles, one was ever so slightly wary of the heiresses improvised by Mme Le Chercheux, and malicious tongues even wagged that she recruited them on the great transatlantic steamers, without enquiring too much about their ancestry, or their own personal histories. Mme Le Chercheux, with her legitimate pride wounded, had felt that it was necessary to respond to such accusations by making herself the intermediary in an exceptional marriage, of one of those dazzling alliances where the dowry of the fiancée is worthy of the suitor’s coat of arms. And that is what she had succeeded in doing by arranging the engagement of the Marquis de Brancade to Miss Nina Alston. Not that the young girl was from fabulous wealth, nor her fiancé from royal lineage; but the fortune of Miss Alston equalled the social standing of M. de Brancade, and both were blessed with a character so pleasant that their union was approved of unanimously.

“How happy I am, my dearest, to see you again in Paris,” repeated Mme Le Chercheux, contemplating with an approving eye the fresh, radiant young girl standing before her. “Sit yourself down next to me, and tell me how everything went over there. I have only been able to sleep soundly since learning of your return.”

Miss Alston sat down, smiling, and took with a calm hand the teacup that her friend offered her.

“But what did you fear? That I would not return from America, or that Henri wouldn’t have the fortitude to bear the six weeks of my absence without abandoning me for a rival?”

Mme Le Chercheux looked at the dainty and teasing face of Miss Alston with a faint gesture of impatience. “But who knows, my child? It’s happened before! Are you that self-confident about everything?”

Miss Alston was still smiling. “What do you mean by that, dear Madame? I am sure I do not to want to marry a gentleman who is capable of forgetting me during an absence of six weeks—and it’s even a little to prove that to him that I went to America myself, rather than leave all the necessary business arrangements to my adviser out here.”

She said this in a playful tone, but with a hint of pride which matched the haughty tilt of her little head, looking like that Diana the huntress, with her chestnut blond hair parted across a wide, domed forehead.

Mme Le Chercheux shrugged her shoulders. “My dear, I have always felt that there was a fanciful side to your calm and energetic character. Believe me, in this day and age, it’s a luxury which becomes rather expensive. But anyway, since your Henri has come out of this test victorious—”

Nina made a sceptical gesture. “Oh, as for that, I can by no means confirm it! It is myself that I wanted to test. I wanted to see if I would be capable of renouncing this marriage if on my return I discovered the slightest change in him, the smallest decline of his affection.”

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“What folly! I so recognize in this the self-interested scruples of your New England bloodline! But as everything went well from a sentimental point of view, please satisfy my material curiosity and tell me if everything is in good order as regards business matters.”

“I believe so, yes. I have an excellent adviser over there, very loyal and very intelligent; and as I don’t depend on anybody else, all that has been quickly settled.” She seemed only to take a faint interest in these financial questions which occupied such a large place in the concerns of Mme Le Chercheux.

“I have only one regret,” she added in a fanciful tone, distractedly turning around her finger the beautiful engagement ring that the Marquis de Brancade had placed there.

“What regret?” asked Mme Le Chercheux roundly. She never knew what surprises this capricious and strong-willed young person had in store for her.

“Of not staying there for my marriage, instead of coming back to Paris. When I returned home to our little village, where my family lived for so many generations, I regretted not having had the idea to marry there, quite simply, in a chiffon dress, like my grandmother.”

Mme Le Chercheux made a forced smile. “That would have been nice, no doubt—and it’s a charming thought. Only, as you don’t have any relatives left—”

The young girl let out a deep sigh. “Oh, there you have it—it’s this isolation that I feared. It’s so sad to be alone in the world as I am!”

“Terribly sad, indeed, my dearest. And yet—who knows?—” Mme Le Chercheux appeared thoughtful. “Parents can be rather bothersome… particularly when one marries abroad…”

A vivid glint passed through the bright eyes of Miss Alston.“Truly… you think so? I would have rather thought that a young girl

supported, protected by family, would have been more sheltered from criticism, and malevolent interests—”

“Well, that depends. If one could choose one’s relatives! But consider this—that pretty Edna Frusk from Omaha… I told you about her, didn’t I? Well, just imagine, my dearest, that I had almost married her to Jean de Montrieux, when she had the dire idea of asking the whole brood to come over—father and mother, sisters and brothers-in-law, grandfather Frusk, and even an implausible great grandparent: a whole comical crowd whose smells were a mixture of both wild animal tamers and the Salvation Army, and who by common consent, rushed to the poor Montrieux family, demanding to be introduced to their friends, talking about buying a mansion in Paris and declaring that the young couple should move in with them, French style… Admittedly, my child,” exclaimed Mme Le Chercheux, reconsidering her words, “I don’t suspect your late family to have in any way resembled that of Jason Frusk; only—”

“Only, in the end, you know nothing about them,” the young girl interrupted gaily, without betraying the slightest resentment. “And so—”

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“And so,” said the baroness, unburdened, “as Henri de Brancade was precisely the friend and confidant of Jean de Montrieux, and as he fully agreed with him—”

“I understand your concern. But don’t worry! You know that, by a strange coincidence, I have no close relatives left.”

“Well, quite frankly, I am not sorry for you. Even the most irreproachable relatives can displease the husband—there is, therefore, one fewer source of potential disagreement; and I’ve often said to my young friends that the absence of a large family is almost as valuable as the possession of a large fortune.”

Miss Alston continued to fix a prudent look upon her.“And you think that Henri is of those who would share your opinion?”Mme Le Chercheux cast her a wary glance. “Do I know? Does one ever

know? I can only tell you that he advised Montrieux to defend himself at all costs against the Frusk invasion. But fortunately, my mischievous dear,” she added, smiling, “it’s a test to which you will not be able to subject your poor fiancé.”

The young girl made a puckish pout.“Indeed,” she replied as she stood up, “I will have to invent some others.”And she took her leave of the baroness.

ii.

On the doorstep to Miss Alston’s apartment, her maid was awaiting her return.

Miss Neff, a sweet and unassuming little spinster who tenderly cared for the young woman, welcomed her with an agitated look and handed over two visiting cards.

“My dear, this lady came earlier. She was very insistent on seeing you, and she’s due back in half an hour.”

Nina led Miss Neff into her pretty salon, full of flowers, old furniture, and thoughtfully-chosen ornaments.

“In half an hour? But I cannot receive her. Don’t you suppose, my good Neffie, that I am waiting for my lord and master?”

Miss Neff blushed modestly. “I had told her firmly, dearest, that I didn’t believe you to be free this afternoon.—But, please, look at the cards.”

The young girl cast them a perfunctory look; then, aghast, let out a little startled scream.

On the largest of the cards she had read the following names:

Mrs. Hamilton AlstonMiss Augusta Germania AlstonMiss Nathalie S. Alston

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and on the smallest:

Caesar Borgia Alston

Miss Neff, hands pressed against her lean bosom, beheld the girl with an anxious eye.

“Well—well—what do you say?”Nina threw the cards on the table. “But that’s absurd! What’s the

meaning of this name Hamilton Alston—my father’s name? I have only a few distant cousins and not one of them bears this first name.”

“And you never had a brother, did you?”“Never. My mother died a few weeks after my birth.”Miss Neff hesitated, then timidly said: “But your father remarried.”The young girl made a sharp, vexed gesture. “Yes, he married, three

years before his death, a young cable girl from the neighbouring village. His marriage so offended my grandmother that my father, already suffering from the illness that would take his life, left for Florida with his wife, and we did not see him again. People said that she cared for him with great devotion, and I don’t know if he ever regretted his choice. But since all that happened in my childhood—you know, I was barely eight years old when my father died—and because my grandmother, with her pride so deeply hurt, never wanted to reconnect with him, I only knew the details of the story much later on, through my guardian, who has also since died.”

Miss Neff, adjusting her binocular with a trembling hand, reread the names on the cards.

“But in that case—supposing then that this… person… is actually the widow of your good father, all these children cannot be your brothers and sisters—?”

Nina let out a great burst of laughter. “Certainly not! And, besides, this Mrs. Alston cannot be my ex-step-mother, because she remarried soon after my father’s death. She married, I believe, a travelling salesman by the name of Sprang. Consequently, she cannot call herself Mrs. Hamilton Alston.”

Miss Neff gave a sigh of relief. “Oh, so much the better! Then we are probably dealing with the wife of such a distant relative that you were unaware of her existence—”

“Apparently so. And yet I would be greatly astonished if that were the case, as my guardian was passionate about genealogy, and together I believe we researched every nook and cranny of the Alston family history.”

Nina turned around abruptly at the sound of the door opening.“Miss,” said the footman, “it is the lady who came earlier.”Nina appeared to think for a moment, then said: “Very well; show her

into the library.”

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She turned, smiling, towards Miss Neff. “Stay here, my good Neffie. Receive M. de Brancade, offer him a cup of tea, and ask him to wait for me. Be friendly to him, but with restraint. Flirting is strictly forbidden!”

She brushed a kiss onto the spinster’s brow, with its receding hair, and made off nonchalantly for the library. Barely had she entered the room than a lady hurried towards her, her cries interspersed with little nervous laughs.

“My dearest child! My eldest daughter! May I call you that, dear Nina?”Miss Alston drew back sharply. “But, Madame, I should really like to

know by what end…”The lady dabbed her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief. “But how?

Doesn’t your heart tell you? It’s true that you were very young… and that we saw little of each other. But I would never forget my charming little step-daughter. Oh, how I suffered when I had to abandon her and accompany your poor father!”

Nina looked at her, confused. Here was a small woman, fat and yet wrinkled, with one of those soft creased faces where one can see evidence of a vague prettiness which has been erased by the slow work of humdrum worries. Her big, slightly crazed eyes were shaded by a scruff of implausibly blond hair, upon which was posed a chic hat of extraordinary shape, which in turn contrasted with the dated cut of a rather tired dress. In one hand, she held a well-used gilt metal purse, and in the other a chinchilla muff, whose worn fur contained various large bald patches.

Nina continued to look at her.“Please, could you explain yourself. Could you truly be my father’s widow?”The lady drew herself up, offended. “You doubt my word? Oh, that is a

blow I was not prepared for!”“I have no wish to cause you offence. But you must understand that I

have the right to ask for some proof, or some explanation.” Nina indicated a chair. “Please, sit down. And tell me how it is that your card bears the name of Mrs. Hamilton Alston. My father’s widow remarried shortly after his death. She was called Mrs. Hiram Sprang.”

The visitor let herself fall into an armchair with a big sigh. “Alas, yes—that is what I called myself at one time, and now I understand your surprise. I should have explained from the outset that I had taken up your dear father’s name again.”

Miss Alston let out a little cry of indignation. “You took back his name? But why—and by what right?”

Mrs. Alston took off a faded glove and wiped her eyes.“You word your question in a hurtful manner; but I do not want to

receive it that way. When you know everything, my dear child, you will take a different tone.” She gave herself over to some tears before resuming: “Mine has been, in fact, a very distressing and tragic tale. The unhappy wretch to whom I gave my hand did not deserve to have someone who had previously been the

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spouse of a gentleman for a wife. Oh, what a contrast between your father and his successor! Do you recall the words of Hamlet to the Queen?

Look first upon this picture, then on that…Hiram Sprang was an individual without sensitivity, and devoid of

any social education. I realised this too late, alas; but after some years of an existence that was unbearable for a sophisticated heart, I divorced Mr. Sprang, and in order to erase the memory of my dire error, I took back the name of Mrs. Hamilton Alston.”

Nina watched her with alarm. “But—pardon me for asking—by what right have you taken it back, this name?”

The other weighed her up with a dignified pride. “By every mother’s right to do what she can to assure and improve her children’s futures. I did not want the three innocent people I had brought into this world to be saddled with the obscure and ridiculous name of Sprang; and, just the day after my divorce, I put them under the aegis of your beautiful surname, which had momentarily been my own.”

As Nina, now speechless with astonishment, did not respond, she continued her explanation in a stream of incoherent words. “I had only one dream for these dear little people—that they, too, would be worthy of carrying this name. I raised them with a reverence for your family, for your tradition of refinement and culture. I talked constantly to them of their dear older sister, of the beautiful and sweet Nina whom they had to meet one day. I wanted especially for my two girls to become ladies—I wanted them to have a role model, and you are the example I set down for them… as for wealth, I am indifferent to it… but I want, I demand that my little girls have a distinguished social standing. Here—their names will make you understand my thinking. Both girls were baptised with names of queens—Augusta Germania, that’s the Empress of Germany. I sent her the photograph of my little girl, naked, baby’s bottle in hand… Nathalie S., that’s Nathalie of Serbia… I sent her majesty a lock of hair from her little protégé, with a milk tooth… here, I have here a charming letter from her lady-in-waiting… oh, you understand, I for one can but live in an ideal world… but for my only son I wanted the name of a fighter, of a man of action, and I named him César Borgia—I so adore Italy! His sisters call him Borgie—you will call him that, won’t you, my dear Nina?”

Through this succession of rambling phrases, cut with asides and lyrical flights, Nina was given to understand a hard and laborious history, the life of a fanciful yet courageous young woman, who was responsible for three children, and continually grappling with harsh financial needs. Nina Alston’s wealth had come to her from her mother, and her father, on dying, had been able to leave only a meagre amount to the second Mrs. Alston. She, lost from her path with her children in one of these small southern towns where opportunities for advancement are quite rare, had nevertheless succeeded, thanks to her unbridled

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labour and managed to send her son to college and give her daughters the taste of elegant indolence that hard working parents dream of giving their offspring.

“I wanted my two little girls to be artistic, and they will be. Augusta has very distinct literary tastes—she collects autographs—and Nathalie, who has a beautiful soprano voice, already sings in the choir at our church, while she prepares for the opera. As for my son, he’s a socialist…” She smiled proudly… “Oh, I don’t share his views… like all women of distinguished spirit, I am a conservative, traditionalist—but well, Socialism is highly thought of these days—it’s what you call chic, is it not?” She continued her story, explaining that, having read the news of Miss Alston’s engagement in the American papers, she had decided to take her children to France so they could meet their step-sister, and attend the celebrations which would doubtless be taking place at the time of the marriage. “That seemed to be an opportune moment for me to show my daughters the artistic masterpieces of the Old World, and also for them to cast a quick glance on this elegant society of which I have so often spoken to them…”

Nina listened with growing surprise. Despite all the ridiculousness and incoherence in her step-mother’s talk, the young girl believed she could sense a kind of fundamental rectitude which did not allow one to doubt her sincerity. And yet she asked herself if this woman, clearly lacking financial means, had truly undertaken the journey to Europe with the sole aim of attending the marriage of a stranger with her children—did she mean to make her way home back to her normal life afterwards? Was she not rather, an astute adventurer, who had risked this costly trip in the hope that her rich step-daughter would take charge of her daughters’ future?

Nina hesitated; then she said with a hint of coldness: “If you have really come so far to attend my marriage, you will find me very touched by this gesture, which is, at the least…greatly unexpected; but allow me to ask you frankly if you didn’t have anything else in mind—if in the end, you don’t have plan to settle in Paris?”

Mrs. Alston, smiling, made a gesture of denial. “Alas, no. I feel I was born for the social and artistic pleasures of the Old World; but for the moment I don’t believe it to be possible. In fact I must return home as soon as possible—perhaps I haven’t told you that I manage the telephone exchange in our town? We have had, for some time now, a great renewal of industrial prosperity, and my position has become quite important, and consequently quite well-remunerated. The town’s prosperity has also enabled my son to gain a managerial position on the railways there, and he too makes a good living. That is how we have been able to realise our long-standing dream and allow ourselves this beautiful trip to Europe; but we must sail in two weeks. However, by then we will have seen lots of beautiful things, and we will return home replete with unforgettable memories and exquisite dreams…”

She delivered these words in a simple and proud tone, which revealed no trace of the grotesque exaltation of her first confidences.

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Nina was flummoxed by such a frank and loyal response; and she immediately felt the desire to repair the injustice she had privately committed in her mind, against her strange visitor.

“But this journey must have been very expensive. If you allow me to speak frankly, indeed as a relative, I would very much like to offer to take care of the cost of your visit…,” she stuttered.

A sudden redness entered Mrs. Alston’s wrinkled cheeks, and she lifted a hand loaded with fake rings to silence her step-daughter.

“Please… I am very touched by what you have just said to me… but let us not mix up material considerations with the perfect happiness of this reunion…” She stood up swiftly, putting on her mended gloves. “No, no, you have not offended me… I am very grateful for your thought… and I will bring my children to you tomorrow since you agree to it… but we are very capable, my son and I, to meet the costs of our little escapade.”

iii.

Three days later, Mme Le Chercheux hurriedly entered Miss Alston’s pretty salon.

“My dear child, I am coming from Mme de Brancade’s house, and I confess that I don’t fully understand what she has just told me.”

Nina welcomed her, smiling. “Sit down, my dear friend. Would you like me to take your stole? No?... What has Henri’s mother told you?” she asked with a calm and reflective air.

“Well I am not too sure… I am still rather stunned by it. She spoke to me of the unexpected arrival of your whole family—here I was believing you alone in the world!—of a step-mother, two step-sisters…”

“And of a step-brother, César Borgia Alston; that is absolutely right,” replied Nina, who sat down behind the tea table and proceeded to pour a cup for the baroness.

“That’s right? That’s right?” she stammered. “But how can that be when you thought yourself without any close relatives?”

“Because I was unaware of this family’s existence. I knew, of course, of my father’s second marriage to a cable girl in our village; but all that happened in my early childhood, and as he left immediately for Florida with his new wife, and never made a return visit before his death, I have never been very well informed about his last years.”

“And all these people fall from the sky without you having had the slightest idea of their existence? Well that’s extraordinary—that’s incredible!” exclaimed Mme Le Chercheux, becoming increasingly exasperated.

“Things often happen like this where I come from. Our country is so large… one must expect all sorts of surprises,” continued the young girl calmly.

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“Good Lord! You swallow this surprise without batting an eyelid? How strong you are, my dear! Truly, I congratulate you…”

Nina raised her eyebrows with a slight air of astonishment. “But they are excellent people, I assure you! Could you not congratulate me rather on having found my family again on the eve of my marriage? I, who was complaining the other day about being all alone in the world!”

“Excellent people… excellent people…,” muttered Mme Le Chercheux… “that may well be, my dearest; but fundamentally, you know nothing about them, because they are strangers to you… and then… and then…”

The young girl interrupted her with a peremptory gesture. “You are mistaken, dear Madame. They are my closest relatives and I wish for them to be welcomed as such!”

The baroness looked at her with a solemn eye. “My poor Nina, you are quite simply mistaken. What rights do they have over you? If only they were people from your world—presentable, as we say here!”

Nina drew herself up. “And who told you that they are not? Mme de Brancade, by any chance? And how would she know, as they haven’t been presented to her yet?”

“Haven’t yet been presented? But how… are you really going to take them to the Brancades? Oh, my poor Nina!...”

The young girl’s face had darkened. “Speak frankly, please. As Mme de Brancade has not yet made the acquaintance of my family, the information she has given you clearly comes from her son. Well, what did Henri say to her? That is what I need to know!”

Mme Le Chercheux hesitated, visibly embarassed. “Come now, my dearest… you don’t mean to suggest that these are society people?”

“Not at all. But I tell you again, these are excellent people; I made sure of that before presenting them to my fiancé. As for the rest, it is only by frequenting society that they will learn its customs; and it seems to me that it is somehow my moral duty to afford them the opportunity.”

“Good Lord!” sighed the baroness.“Anyway,” repeated the young girl, “what did Henri say to his mother?”“Oh, as for that, my child, I know nothing. But I come to implore you not

to insist that Mme de Brancade invite your step-mother to the family dinner arranged for next week.”

“Oh—so that’s the message she asked you to convey?”“On the contrary. I took it upon myself to warn you of the danger in

which you are putting yourself.”Nina burst out laughing. “Danger! There is a formidable word! But

was Henri so completely horrified by my relatives? Dear Madame, I am very grateful to you for having informed me of this; as, whilst I saw that he was a little disconcerted by the appearance of these good people, I didn’t suspect him

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of fearing their contact to that extent. Well, I know where I stand, and I know how to behave as a result.”

Mme Le Chercheux stood up with a desperate gesture. “My dear Nina, think it over… do not persist with this!” she implored; and at the salon door she stopped to hurl a last cry at the young girl: “Remember the Frusks, I beg you!”

Nina responded only with a vague smile, which asserted the resolute will of a whole line of fighters; then she turned around without seeing her friend out.

On the doorstep of the apartment Mme Le Chercheux collided with a slim, dark young man who had just come out of the elevator. She stopped and seized him by both hands.

“Oh, my poor Henri—my poor dear friend!”M. de Brancade looked at her with a derisive smile.“Have you seen them, dear Madame?”“No—but I have just left your mother’s. She told me of your feelings, and

you find me aghast, devastated… There’s nothing to be done with Nina for the moment—that child is too kind-hearted! But I will search, I will find and I will relieve her, in spite of herself, of this terrible burden!”

The young man grasped her hands. “I know that we can count on your friendship. Meanwhile I am looking for a solution on my side. And do you know what I have come here to do? To ask Nina on behalf of my mother to bring the whole family to her home!”

Mme Le Chercheux let out a horror-stricken cry. “What? To the Brancade mansion? For the family dinner? My dear Henri! Have you properly thought about it?”

M. de Brancade made a gesture of denial. “No. My mother is keen to make their acquaintance without further delay, and she wishes to offer them a cup of tea tomorrow, privately.”

“Tomorrow—tomorrow—” stammered the baroness, aghast.He looked at her with his shrewd smile. “Do you not see? Do you not

think that Nina, when she has presented her step-family to my family, will see for herself that it would be better, for her and for them, that they do not attend the dinner?”

Mme Le Chercheux looked at him tenderly. “May God see to it, my dear friend! Your idea is brilliant—but Nina is incredibly stubborn!”

iv.

The dowager Marchioness de Brancade lived, in the Rue de Lille, in a majestic mansion set between a courtyard and garden.

While Nina Alston, fine and pink in her outfit of requisite simplicity, led her family across the echoing tiles of the large entrance hall, she heard an

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ecstatic gasp behind her. She turned round, and saw Mrs. Hamilton Alston standing before a tall display window, wherein proudly stood an encased mummy, brought back from Egypt by the late Marquis, a distinguished explorer and archaeologist.

“Heavens! It’s an ancestor—a crusader, no doubt? Come here, children! Augusta, César, Nathalie, look at this prehistoric being, who must be the first of the Brancades!”

The footman who was leading the group stopped with a stupefied look, and Nina said smiling: “It’s a mummy, I believe.”

“A mummy?” repeated César Borgia, a fat, cheeky and chubby-faced young man. “In that case, let’s not lag behind. We will see many more of them in this world you are going to present to us.”

Mme de Brancade was waiting for her guests in the large reception room on the second floor, flanked by her son and her eldest daughter, the Countess of Pontange. Sat in her armchair, under the full-length portrait of the great Marshal de Brancade, the Marchioness resembled one of those fine paintings in which Rigaud displayed the noble and severe characteristics of the dowagers of his age. She welcomed Nina with kindness, and her family with a politeness which barely concealed an astonishment approaching horror.

Mrs. Hamilton Alston, in honour of the visit, was wearing a light dress, of doubtful freshness, and an even more extravagant hat than the one she had sported when presenting herself at Nina’s. Augusta and Nathalie, puny and pale young girls, who seemed to want to compensate for their own insignificance by the sonority of their voices, had dressed themselves up in the same way; by contrast the soft hat and the little checked jacket of César Borgia appeared to proclaim his democratic disregard for social convention.

While his mother and sisters confused themselves in their curtseys before Mme de Brancade and her daughter, the young César struck his future brother-in-law amiably on the stomach; then threw himself into the armchair which the dowager had just vacated, and said while looking around him: “How come you haven’t installed electric light yet?”

Mme de Brancade spoke only a few words of English, but her son and Mme de Pontange had such a good command of the language that a steady conversation soon followed between them and the young Alstons. As for Mrs. Alston, who declared having won first prize for French at college, she boldly addressed the dowager in a jargon which rather resembled the language used by English comics on the Parisian stage.

She began by telling her how happy she was to find herself on an intimate footing in one of these French aristocratic salons that she knew so well from anecdotes and historical novels; then she began to tell her own story, insisting especially on her artistic and literary tastes, and on the innate “refinement” which had pushed her, despite the many vicissitudes in her career, to make a place, for herself and her children, amongst the “aristocrats of culture.”

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The dowager, wholly embarrassed to find herself perched on a little occasional chair, whilst the young César lounged in her soft armchair, listened with growing astonishment to Mrs. Alston’s confidences, while every so often casting a concerned look to the Marquess de Brancade. It was almost a relief for her when Augusta Germania, standing up suddenly with a burst of laughter, came towards her brandishing an album.

“You must give me your autograph, you sweet old thing!” said the young girl affectionately; and as the thunderstruck Mme de Brancade watched her, she turned towards the Marquess and said: “Henri, give your mother a quill then. You know, I mainly collect titles. I have three countesses in my book and I absolutely must have a marchioness!”

Mrs. Alston looked proudly upon her daughter. “Oh, Marchioness, you would do well to do as she asks! When it comes to her autographs, my little Augusta is not afraid to ask of anyone, and thanks to her persistence she has already gathered a unique collection. Just the other day, on the boat, there was a baroness who shut herself away in her cabin because of a great bereavement—she had just lost her husband. Well, my little girl didn’t have a baroness, and wouldn’t let herself be discouraged. She borrowed the stewardess’ hat and apron and snuck into the cabin—”

Nina Alston stood up before her step-mother could finish. “I trust that we have already kept Mme de Brancade too long,” she said calmly, with a smile. “And in addition, I promised César that we would have a quick look around les Invalides when we pass by.”

v.

Three days had passed since the Alstons’ visit to the Marchioness de Brancade.

Nina Alston was standing in her usual place, behind the tea table in her salon, which was softly lit and perfumed with spring flowers. Opposite her, her fiancé, leant against the mantlepiece, and with a shaky hand rearranged the jade trinkets placed between the two slender candlesticks that went with a beautiful Falconnet clock.

The two young people had fallen silent a few moments before and the darkened face of M. de Brancade quite clearly indicated…

Edith Wharton

Translated from the French by Kate Wright (with thanks to Don Clarke). Revised by Gérald Préher and Xavier Le Brun

THE GOLDEN TOWER: A FAIRY TALE

Adam sat beneath the wooden water tank on the roof of his building on West 57th Street, scanning the new tower block across the street with his binoculars. The walls were of tinted glass, with structural beams of an alloy that had a distinct golden cast. His neighbors had turned on their lights for the evening, so they were highlighted in their windows as though on a stage. On the tenth floor a woman he had named Mrs. Boring stirred a pot on her stove, while Mr. Boring texted in an armchair. Unlike many occupants, they left their curtains open to the night, so that any random voyeur could spy on them. But there was nothing to see. Even their sex life on their rumpled bed relied relentlessly on the missionary position.

Still, it was an improvement over the views into the ramshackle building this tower had replaced. The only thing to watch there had been elderly women opening cans of food for their cats. These widows, living in rent-controlled apartments on their social security checks, had been bussed to a welfare hotel in the Bronx to make room for this golden tower.

The full moon above Central Park cast shadows across the drives, along which intrepid joggers still ran and bikers in tight shorts pedaled.

Adam shifted his field glasses to the top of the tower, at a level with his own tar-surfaced roof. A woman he had never seen before stood at the railing of her balcony, gazing out toward the park. Backlit by lamplight from her living room, she appeared to have plaited her hair into braids that wreathed her head and snaked down her back. He twisted the lenses of his field glasses to increase their magnification and focused on her face. But the light coming from behind her head threw her face into shadows. Adam realized he was standing so still that he had stopped breathing. He drew a deep breath and lowered his glasses.

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He had always scoffed at the concept of love at first sight, but this woman had just turned him into a believer.

Every night, while the full moon over the park waned to a crescent, Adam studied his new love on her balcony. All day long he sat at his desk in his cubicle in the Met Life building, performing the paperwork required for his job as an auto insurance adjuster and dreaming of the nighttime and the golden tower across his street, where the silent woman with the long braids waited. At precisely 9 pm, she would emerge on to the balcony, stand by the railing, and gaze off into the park. At precisely 9:30 pm, a creature resembling an orangutan would come out the door, encircle her wrist with fingers that appeared to end in claws, and drag her back inside. But the woman’s mien of calm indifference never altered, as though she were under the spell of an evil magician.

Such passivity only increased Adam’s ardor. All his life he had suffered from the indignity of knowing that he had entered this world by way of a vagina. His attempts to reenter those clammy vises owned by forlorn women met on Match.com had been disheartening. The greedy sucking paroxysms that vaginas demanded from him as an adult reminded him too vividly of the one from which he had barely escaped as an infant. His favorite fetish was a passive female, and at last he had found one! Night after night his new beloved just stood there, silent and motionless, while he adored her from across the street through the steamed-up lenses of his faithful binoculars.

Eventually, Adam realized that he didn’t even know what his inamorata looked like. He had only seen her backlit on her balcony at night. He began to crave a glimpse of her in all her splendor during daylight hours. So he cashed in his 401 K and quit his job. Each morning, he would pack a ham sandwich and a bottle of water in his backpack, ascend to his roof, and sit in the shade of his water tower, waiting for his love to appear on her balcony across the street.

He waited a long time. The dog days of summer turned cool, and the leaves on the trees in the park began to flare red and orange and spiral to the ground. Soon Adam had to wear his down vest and Ugh boots during his forays to the roof. And still the woman had not appeared to him in the light of day. Though his nighttime vigils continued. He saw himself as her guardian, keeping watch over her terrace even when he couldn’t actually see her.

But one sunny afternoon shortly before Thanksgiving, the balcony door opened and out the woman came. She was just as stunning as he had been imagining, with her fair hair braided, and the braids encircling her head and looping down her back. She resembled the Circassian concubines in the paintings of Turkish harems, which he had viewed at the Met a number of times while trying to convince dreary dates from Match.com that he wasn’t interested in them just for sex.

She wore running shoes and yoga pants and a cropped Pussy Riot tee shirt. He noted with alarm that her cheekbones were so prominent that they cast shadows across her cheeks, and her eyes were sunken into their sockets.

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Her hip bones protruded like ax heads below the waistband of her pants, and her breasts lay almost flat against her chest. Adam was accustomed to the fashionably gaunt women of New York City, but his beloved appeared to be overdoing it. He wanted to toss her his ham sandwich, but instead he remained hidden beneath his wooden water tank trying to figure out what to do next.

For the first time ever, the woman herself didn’t remain motionless. Instead, she took her braids, one by one, and unplaited them. Her freed hair was so long that it pooled on the balcony floor. She knelt down and gathered it up in her arms like harvested wheat. Then she dropped it over the railing, where it gleamed like spun gold in the sunlight. A faint breeze off the park caused this curtain to stir like a luffing sail. Adam’s mouth fell open. More than anything, he longed to crawl up under that golden duvet of hair and huddle there forever, protected from the bustle and cruelty of the outside world.

Adam soon became convinced that his beloved was being held captive by that unattractive simian beast who dragged her off the balcony into the apartment each night at 9:30 pm. Somehow he had to rescue her. But how? She was on the thirty-fifth floor of a tower with no outside staircases. Had her braids been several yards longer, he could have seized one and swung across the abyss to her balcony like Tarzan on a grapevine. Had he been a Flying Wallenda, he could perhaps have stretched a tightrope between his building and hers and tiptoed across the canyon that separated them. But instead he was an overweight middle-aged man who had always been chosen last for sports teams in his youth. He was not hero material, yet love was suddenly requiring him to act like one.

The next morning, Adam strolled across the street to the entrance of the golden tower to suss out the lay of the land. The doorway was flanked by two huge Corinthian columns that were entwined with plaster acanthus vines gilded with gold leaf. A doorman built like a barroom bouncer stood behind a desk along one wall. He wore a navy blue jacket with gold buttons and epaulettes. Adam couldn’t tell from his haughty demeanor whether or not he might be bribable.

Just then, an elevator door opened and out came the burly creature from the penthouse terrace. His face was framed by a flaming corona of hair the color of an apricot poodle. He wore a double-breasted overcoat of coyote fur that matched his hair and sideburns. His eyes, beneath bushy apricot brows, were beady slits, and a large mouth with prominent lips dominated the bottom half of his face. His feet splayed outward at forty-five degree angles as he walked, so that he seemed to occupy the entire corridor as he lurched from side to side. On either hand and behind him trod three beetle-browed men in black trench coats, who eyed Adam as though he were an unexploded IED.

Outside, the doorman opened the rear door of a black Bentley Bentayga W12 First Edition. Adam blinked, knowing from his career as an auto adjuster that this SUV was the fastest on earth with 600 horsepower, and that it retailed for close to three hundred thousand dollars. The three bodyguards clambered into a second Bentley, and the convoy sped off to evict more welfare widows.

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Adam wandered back across the street to his own building, deeply discouraged. He saw no way to rescue the woman he loved before she starved to death in her golden tower. He was unemployed and uncoordinated, whereas her captor was vast in girth and owned the fastest SUV ever made. That night, for the first time in several months, he didn’t go up to his roof to squat beneath his water tower. Instead, he lay on his bed and tried to envision other less dangerous women on whom he might train his binoculars.

Nevertheless, at noon the next day Adam found himself in his local pizza parlor, attired in jeans, a sweatshirt and a Mets cap. He ordered a large meat-lovers pizza. Carrying the flat gray take-out box, he walked into the entryway of the golden tower.

“Pizza for the penthouse,” he announced to the doorman.“I’ll take it up,” said the doorman, reaching for it.“Please, man, give me a break. They’ll tip me, and then I’ll split it with you.”The doorman hesitated. “I’m not supposed to allow anyone up there.”“I won’t tell if you won’t,” said Adam.The doorman shrugged. “Deal. Last elevator on the left.”The elevator door was embossed with a gold-leafed scene from the

Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd prince was trying to decide whether to name Hera, Athena or Aphrodite the fairest of them all. Adam agreed with his choice of Aphrodite. It was now clear to him that love was the only game in town. He was prepared to court death at the hands of that apricot orangutan in order to serve this goddess whom he had loved for so long.

Inside the elevator, the only button was labeled thirty-five. When the door swept open, he stood directly outside the penthouse entrance. He drew a deep breath to calm his roiling stomach and then rang the bell. The door opened, and there was the woman of his dreams, wearing her yoga pants and Pussy Riot tee shirt.

“Pizza, m’am.”She grabbed his arm and dragged him inside, seizing the box, hurling

it on to the kitchen counter, wrenching it open, ripping off a slice, and stuffing it into her mouth point first. “Tank God you finally come,” she muttered, her mouth full.

She had some kind of Slavic accent to match her Circassian appearance. For the first time Adam was close enough to discover that she had blue-green eyes the tint of algae in a clear mountain lake. And never in his life had he seen so much hair sprouting from the head of a single individual. Her braids ran every which way around her head and down her back, like a Cat’s Cradle run amuck.

She consumed half the pizza in a matter of minutes. Then she paused to belch and to catch her breath. “Every night I stand on balcony, prayink for pizza,” she explained.

“Are you being held here against your will?”

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“At first I vant to be here. Husband when we date promise if I kiss him in right places, he change from hairy troll into handsome stud. I kiss and I kiss but nothink happen. He say he can only love me if I stay thin. So he install home gym, and I supposed to spend all day workink out. Not allowed to go down to street. Only food vat he bring me. All he ever bring is kale and apples and spring vater.”

“What do you think your husband would do if you were no longer thin?” Over her shoulder Adam could see a treadmill, exercise bicycle, elliptical trainer, rowing machine, stair stepper, weight bench, and a set of barbells and hand weights. The only equipment missing from this modern-day torture chamber were the rack and the breaking wheel.

She sighed. “He marry four vives. Each one ven she gain veight he divorce.”

“I live just across the street,” said Adam, thinking fast. “I can bring you a pizza every day, if you like?”

“Dat would be so fantastic!” She clapped her hands with delight. “But now you must go. Doorman gettink suspicious. Husband, he pay him to make sure no one go in or out. Eva is my name.” She extended her hand.

“Adam.” Her hand was so soft and warm that Adam’s atria nearly fibrillated. He prayed to Aphrodite that this touch would be the first of many between them.

As he left, Adam tipped the doorman $50 to ensure reentry the next day. For the next couple of weeks Adam brought his sweetheart pizza in all its varieties—napoletana and bianca, quattro formaggi and viennese, alla casalinga and romana, capricciosa and sfincione.

One day as she chewed a slice of quattro stagioni, Eva said, “All dose time I see you sittink under vater tank, Adam, I tink you just want from me sex, like other men.”

“You knew I was watching you?”“Of course. Moonlight and sunlight, they reflect off little telescope

glasses like tiny cat eyes in dark. I not know why you dere every night. But now I startink to tink you care if I be happy or not.”

“I do care,” said Adam earnestly, carefully refraining from acknowledging that he wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed either. He had apparently achieved hero status in her eyes, despite his complete unsuitability for the role, and he would never disappoint her if he could help it.

A few days later, as they shared a pugliese pizza, Adam studied Eva’s cheekbones and realized with satisfaction that they were receding and becoming engulfed by encroaching flesh. Screwing up his courage, he finally dared to goad the elephant in the room: “I have a plan for us, Eva.”

She looked up at him with her smoky blue green eyes, as a strand of mozzarella that stretched from her slice to her luscious lips trembled.

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“I’ll keep on bringing you pizzas until you grow fat. Your husband will throw you out, and then you can move across the street and live with me.”

She thought this over for such a long time that Adam was convinced his aggression had alienated her. He began to catalogue the various methods of suicide, weighing the pros and cons of each, in search of the least painful.

Finally she replied, “Yes, Adam. Let us do dis tink! But one request I have for you.”

“Anything!” said Adam, incredulous that this gorgeous woman had inexplicably agreed to move from a luxury penthouse in a golden tower into his tiny rent-controlled hidey-hold across the street.

“Please can you sometime bring me Vopper and French fry and milkshake of chocolate?”

“Yes,” he said fervently. “Yes, Whoppers it is—my light, my love, my life!”

Lisa Alther

liSa altheR on the oRiginS oF the StoRy

Following the 2016 American presidential election, I was living in New York City, and every time I walked around Central Park, I had to pass through the ominous shadow cast by the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle. Several times I joined the chanting protesters on their route down Central Park South to the Fifth Avenue tower in which the incoming First Family was still living.

Feeling helpless and hopeless, I must have regressed to my childhood because I started thinking about “Rapunzel” and “Beauty and the Beast”. Both featured attractive women imprisoned by sinister ogres. I began to compose in my head an urban version of these fairy tales, assigning an ordinary New Yorker the role of the prince charged with rescuing a beautiful damsel being held captive in a soaring high-rise penthouse. Every night at bedtime a simian brute would drag her off the terrace into his apartment. My prince finally found a way to woo and win this woman. But unlike in “Beauty and the Beast”, her captor never did become lovable, or even likable.

It cheered me up to write this story and to give my friends and me some much-needed laughter amidst our post-election despair. But humor offers more than just laughter: It helps us detach from troubling situations so that we can gain the perspective necessary to cope with them – and possibly overcome them.

PART FOUR

BOOK REVIEWS

AN ORGANON OF LIFE KNOWLEDGE: GENRES AND FUNCTIONS OF THE SHORT STORY

IN NORTH AMERICA, BY MICHAEL BASSELER (BIELEFELD, TRANSCRIPT, 2019)

Anyone interested or engaged in short story theory and criticism cannot but welcome the publication of Michael Basseler’s An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America. This monograph is undoubtedly an important contribution to the study of the short narrative form, a field that has experienced an unprecedented growth in the last thirty years or so. The volume tackles the old question of the connection between literature and life by investigating—to quote Basseler’s words in the introduction—“the complex interrelationship between real life and narrative make-believe […] ask[ing] how the genre of the North-American short story has functioned and continues to function as what I would like to call an organon of life knowledge, i.e. an ‘instrument of thought or knowledge’ that contributes to a culturally modelled notion of life” (17). In line with Terry Eagleton (The Meaning of Life [2007]), Basseler contributes to the rehabilitation of the term “life” against postructuralist and postmodernist hostility towards this concept. By “life,” however, he does not refer to some stable and attainable essence, but to a culturally constructed shared fiction. A similar approach is favoured with the term “knowledge”. Following Martha Nussbaum (Love’s Knowledge [1990]) and Rita Felski (Uses of Literature [2008]), Basseler states that “knowledge” is not something directly given, but formally shaped, conveyed through a specific medium or genre with distinct epistemic qualities and bound to a particular context as, in this case, the short story in North America.

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Inspired by Ottmar Ette’s vindication of literary studies as a form of life science against the general claim that only hard sciences produce legitimate knowledge of life, Basseler’s study is informed by the work of literary cognitivists and reception theorists (David Davies, Henry D. Herring, Tilman Köppe, Wolfgang Iser or Winfred Fluck among others). Thus, one of the central ideas in Basseler’s argument is that the act of reading entails a transfer of knowledge and meaning between the text and the reader in his/her extra-textual experience. There is a transformative and dynamic interaction going on between text and reader that erases the line separating the former from the latter. The literary work, therefore, is neither an autotelic object as the New Critics maintained, nor a naively mimetic reflection of “external” life, and whatever life knowledge it contains is not given in the form of a repository of fixed values, views and ideals conveyed to the reader as a passive recipient. Instead, the reader stands as an active participant in the construction of knowledge, in the sense that he/she endows the text with new meanings—produces a “second narrative” (69)—while at the same time modifying his/her sense of life in the process. Text and reader mutually affect each other—the reader in making meaning of the text, the text in making meaning of (the reader’s) life. In highlighting the active role of readers and literary works, Basseler draws respectively on the works of Angsar Nünning (for whom the reader negotiates and produces cultural knowledge of life) and Hubert Zapf (for whom literature transforms rather than preserves hegemonic discourses, articulating alternative forms of life and integrating otherwise separated bodies of knowledge). This bidirectional, interactive production of literary life knowledge is necessarily provisional and mutable, determined as it is by the historical and individual context of the work’s production and reception.

As stated in the title of the volume, Basseler’s take on literary life knowledge is not focused on literature or fiction in general—though this is certainly also an aim of the book—but on the North-American short story in particular. His is a genre-specific approach centred on the short story as a format, medium or organon of life knowledge. A mere look at the table of contents will give an idea of how the line of argument traced in the chapters progresses orderly from the more general to the more specific, from the development of the theoretical framework already condensed in the “Introduction” to the critical readings of particular texts.

The introduction of the volume is much more than a mere description of its contents: much of it can be read separately as an introductory essay to literature, fiction and the (North-American) short story as a vehicle of life knowledge. The final “Coda” recapitulates the volume’s main lines of argument after a chapter-length discussion of a piece by non-US American author Alice Munro “as a prime example of the short story’s epistemological qualities and potential” (231). The preceding 12 chapters are distributed into three parts: “Part One: Life, Literature, and Knowledge: Theoretical Premises” (Chs. 1-3), “Part Two: The Genericity of Literary Life Knowledge in the Short Story” (Chs. 4-7) and

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“Part Three: Stages of Life—Staging Life in the Short Story” (Chs. 8-12). The first three chapters (Part One) are devoted to a thorough and theoretically-informed explanation of the interaction between literary text and reader and of the transfer of life knowledge at work in it in the terms sketched above. The four chapters in Part Two clarify how this transferential dynamic takes place in the case of the short story in general and of the North-American short story in particular. The line of argument concerning the co-production of literary life knowledge thus narrows down and becomes more specific in terms of literary genre and socio-historical context. The basic idea as already advanced in the introduction is that the transfer of life knowledge between literary text and the reader’s non-literary experience is often achieved in the short story through sudden recognition, insight or epiphany. Although this is not always the case, as Basseler explicitly recognizes, short stories usually depict moments of crisis—rather than resolution—in a character’s life situation in which culturally established modes of life knowledge are challenged and rendered unreliable, opening the possibility for the character’s reconfiguration of his/her own identity and the world around him/her. Short stories narrativize crises and turning points in a sharp manner on virtue of the genre’s defining brevity and related features such as concentration, elusiveness, suggestion, indirection, ellipsis, etc. The formal and structural characteristics of the genre require a more actively engaged reader than longer narratives, where there is much more space for explicit character and plot development. Basseler refers to the work of Renate Brosch (Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung [2007]) and her concept of “projective reading” (95): the fact that short stories constantly force readers to transgress textual boundaries and have recourse to extratextual frames of reference. But this transgression also affects the readers’ frame of reference itself as short stories, in Brosch’s view, also exert what she calls a “pressure of dissonance” (96), making readers adjust their set of values, beliefs and ideas to those found in the text. Drawing on Brosch’s and other epistemological approaches to the short story (Charles May, Thomas M. Leicht and David Trotter), Basseler summarizes the effect of short fiction on the reader’s life knowledge as follows: “Providing the reader with the experience of a transitional phase, crisis and /or turning point—short stories have the potential to retroact on the reader’s understanding of life and its underlying values and norms” (102).

Life and narrative develop in time. As also announced in the introduction, the question of temporality is central in Basseler’s argument. It structures the second half of the book, in which readings of particular stories and typologies of (sub)genres of short fiction are proposed. The episodic nature of short stories emphasizes “the situational in human life and identity, while de-emphasizing the teleological life-model that underlies the traditional novel” (37). Chapter 7 highlights the prominence of temporality—the awareness, theorization and, most importantly, the acceleration of time—in modernity, a process that goes hand in hand with the development of individualism and coincides in time with

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the emergence of the American short story, a genre that has always enjoyed a relatively wide readership and was/is readily available in innumerable magazines and other print outlets in the US—The New Yorker being a good case in point. Basseler draws on sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s description of the shift in temporal conceptions of identity due to social changes in Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (2013). Rosa argues that traditional societies saw major transformations every three generations so that identity was safely anchored in stable structures. In classical modernity, however, social structures suffered major changes every generation, with the consequence that identity was understood in terms of an individual’s life-span. The process of social transformation was further accelerated in late modernity to the point that an individual can no longer rely on a single social structure during his/her lifetime to build his/her sense of identity, which now becomes “situational” rather than permanently “stable” (119). Basseler concludes—roughly and cum grano salis—that “the ‘life knowledge’ of the short story seems more in keeping with a high modern or late modern concept of a transitory, temporal identity” (120). This is more clearly the case in moment-of-truth stories than in those that compress a character’s lifetime in a few pages, but even in the latter case, Basseler argues, stories do likewise “foreground the temporal dimension of human life” (125).

The rest of the book is devoted to the discussion of a selection of short stories arranged according to the notion of life-stages (childhood/youth, adulthood and [old] age), which is the major conceptual framework for the processes of temporalization, chronologization and biographization that life underwent in North-American modernity. The readings of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (as a collision of chronotopes) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (as an exposure of the conventional character of the life stages) at the end of Part Two serve to establish an adequate transition to the critical part of the book (Part Three). Adolescence as a critical stage par excellence in “stories of initiation” by Sherwood Anderson, Eudora Welty and Junot Diaz is the focus of Chapter 8. The preference for fiction that features young protagonists is in accordance with the North-American ideal of the new beginning, while the tendency of the short story to focus on moments of decision matches the idea of adolescence as a period of crises and turning points in the passage towards future integration in society, as the pieces selected for discussion show. Chapter 9 considers “stories of mid-life crisis,” situations of professional and private discontent in which characters are affected by a moment of truth concerning the unreliability of social structures. Basseler selects John Cheever’s “The Country Husband” (1954) as an example of a character’s reconfiguration of his knowledge of life that pivots around a radical crisis within the context of middle-class suburban America after World War II, the staple of Cheever’s fictional world.

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In Chapter 10, Basseler delineates two interrelated short fiction (sub)genres, “stories of ‘unlived’ life” and “stories of secret life,” narratives in which the protagonists’ experience is characterized by the divorce between the life they live(d) and the life they could have lived. In all of them, readers are prompted to reflect on the characters’ decisions and their own lives through narrative comment (as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” [1835] and Sherwood Anderson’s “The Other Woman” [1920]), through comicity (as in James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” [1939]), or in a more tragic or pathetic key (as in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” [1903]). Like youth and maturity, old age is culturally constructed and valued. In the modern North-American context, old age was gradually addressed as a problem as it clashed with the capitalist “paradigm of efficiency and accomplishment” (196), an attitude that even acquired gerontophobic connotations. Chapter 11 deals with two stories featuring old characters, Willa Cather’s “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932) and Eudora Welty’s “Old Mr. Marblehall” (1941). Whereas Cather’s piece offers the reader a more positive view of old age attached to the traditional, pre-modern values of the pioneer community, Welty’s is more in tune with the gerontophobic spirit of the age—as articulated for instance in Ignatz Nascher’s seminal book Geriatrics (1915). Basseler even shows how Welty seems to reproduce phrases from Nascher’s monograph in a story in which the narrator invites the reader to share a negative view on old age. Chapter 12 proposes another generic type, “stories of remembered life,” in which a character’s life course is reviewed and evaluated retrospectively. In this case we are dealing with stories that “know” and represent life as a sequence of events instead of approaching it as a moment of crisis accompanied by a revelation. As Basseler states, memory is central here, a faculty that shares with fiction the “principles and strategies of selection, causation, and narrativization” (217). Willa Cather’s “Neighbour Rosicky” (1930) is chosen for discussion, a story that combines different narrative voices which come together in considering the title-character’s experience as an example of a good life. In this type of stories, readers are invited to compare the narrative with that of their own lives so as to obtain some insight concerning their identity and living experience.

Finally, the book’s “Coda” offers a reading of “What Do You Want to Know That For?” (2006) by Alice Munro, a Canadian writer whose fictional world is located in rural Ontario yet whose masterful handling of the short form’s potentialities invests the regional with universal meanings. The story features an elderly woman who confronts a cancer diagnosis that undermines her certainties by deciding to take a tour around the rural areas. The negative version of old age is rejected as she takes an active role not just by travelling but by integrating in her homodiegetic narrative a vast array of epistemological discourses, thus offering a view of life as a more complex and dynamic object of knowledge than monological accounts would make us think.

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Perhaps Basseler could have offered more detailed readings of pieces selected for discussion. To give only one example, the intergenerational continuity pointed out by the narrator in Willa Cather’s “Old Mrs. Harris” could be interpreted as a fictional rendition of pre-modern temporality in H. Rosa’s view, in tune with the traditional social and individual values that the text and the author endorse. Of course, were Basseler to have written more extensively on the stories, he would have produced a much longer volume. As it stands, An Organon of Life Knowledge is a well-balanced, theoretically well-informed and critically insightful monograph that opens new ground in the field of short story theory and criticism. We need more books like this one to expand our knowledge of life and literature and of their mutual interaction.

Jorge Sacido-Romero University of Santiago de Compostela

KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND PERIODICAL CULTURE, BY CHRIS MOURANT

(EDINBURGH, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019)

Katherine Mansfield scholarship has grown exponentially in the twenty-first century. The conference held in London in 2008, marking the centenary of her arrival in Europe, was swiftly followed by the foundation of the Katherine Mansfield Society, along with the journal Katherine Mansfield Studies. A succession of further conferences, lectures and related activities continues round the world, including those taking place in New Zealand. The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works, overseen by Gerri Kimber, has provided definitive versions of Mansfield’s prodigious output, including her poetry, journals and critical writing as well as the fiction. Even though her best-known stories—“The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” “The Doll’s House”—have become some of the most widely anthologised short stories in the English language, scholarly attention on the scale of that afforded modernist novelists such as Virginia Woolf, has been slower to arrive. Evaluations of Mansfield’s achievements often focused, for better or worse, on biographical readings of her work.

The growth of Mansfield criticism has enabled a broader diversity of approaches, looking in more detail at specific aspects of her writing. In his Introduction to Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture, Chris Mourant acknowledges that his own research builds on that of several other Mansfield specialists, amongst them Jenny McDonnell, Angela Smith, Sydney Janet Kaplan and Claire Davison, as well as a more general interest in print culture and modernist magazines that has emerged in recent years. Mourant adopts a dialogic approach to investigate periodicals as “multi-vocal spaces of contest

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and negotiation, in which peripheral, marginal, exilic and emergent voices found expression from within the institutions of metropolitan literary culture” (15) in this outstanding example of the new Mansfield scholarship.

Katherine Mansfield’s first publications under that name, shortly before she left New Zealand for good, were the vignettes and sketches she contributed to The Native Companion, an Australian journal following a modernist aesthetic. The cover of this magazine is one of the many striking examples of magazine artwork included in Mourant’s book. The figure of a native girl feeding the native companions themselves (a species of Australian crane) suggests a benign primitivism, but, as Mourant argues, Mansfield’s early writings were already challenging colonial myths and positing the sense of a more diffuse, geographically displaced homeland filtered through a poetic sensibility. Mansfield’s resistance towards modernist primitivism is one of the recurring themes in Mourant’s study, particularly in the second chapter, “Rhythm: Parody and (Post)Colonial Modernism.”

Each of the four chapters of the book focusses on Mansfield’s relationship with a specific periodical in chronological order—The New Age, Rhythm, The Athenaeum and, finally, The Adelphi, founded shortly after Mansfield’s death by her husband, John Middleton Murry. The book also includes a list of Mansfield’s periodical contributions within her lifetime; and two unpublished texts discovered by Mourant—a 1909 story, entitled “A Little Episode,” and “Bites from the Apple,” a sequence of aphorisms composed in 1911, with The New Age in mind. Mourant likens “Bites from the Apple” to the various feminist provocations initiated, under different pseudonyms, by Beatrice Hastings, co-editor with A.R. Orage, of The New Age; and to the fashionable model of Nietzsche’s aphorisms. “Bites from the Apple” may well, as Mourant argues, have helped to train Mansfield in the art of compression, but they themselves are not exactly concise. Some are paragraph-length fables, that nowadays would be considered flash fiction. Others provide laboured analogies, reminiscent of the wisdom you might find on mugs or greetings cards: “Life’s a game of cards—which mainly consists of shuffling” (282).

Mourant’s chapter on The New Age provides enlightening insights into Mansfield’s professional relationship with Beatrice Hastings. Hastings is revealed as a type of alternative Mansfield, not as talented (who could be?) but deserving due credit as a feminist writer and magazine editor. Like Mansfield she had come from the colonies (in her case, South Africa), to make her mark on metropolitan culture. More of a polemicist than Mansfield, she was an energetic contributor to her own journal, publishing contrary viewpoints under several different pen names. Mourant argues that her editorial, aesthetic and ideological input into Mansfield’s writings may be greater than has been assumed. Most importantly, he connects Hastings’s development of a freer, more subjective and fractured prose style in her journalism to a type of feminism that puts its energy into personal liberation and mental freedom,

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rather than placing too much trust in legislative change. Both the writing style and the philosophy were, he says convincingly, important influences on Mansfield’s writing. Mourant praises the “sharp impersonality” of “Bites from the Apple” (76); but this is not a piece that has stood the test of time as well as her more fluent and multi-vocal texts.

One obvious reason for Mansfield’s current popularity has been the revival of interest in the short-story form. There is no writer from whom the novice can learn so much; and the trick of spontaneity that she mastered with so much hard work and so little visible artifice means that her stories remain as fresh as ever. But as her whole body of writing emerges including collaborations and texts whose authorship is still disputed, it becomes clear that Mansfield was not at all interested in rigid formal distinctions, such as those between long and shorter forms. What she cared about was writing that really mattered, that had an urgency and emotional reach that was appropriate to the times, particularly in the aftermath of the Great War. She was not alone in her desire for literary re-invention, as Mourant’s chapter on The Atheneum, “‘Wanted, a New Word (World)’” demonstrates, but what always distinguishes Mansfield from her fellow littérateurs is her playfulness. The earnest conversations about the future of the novel, parodied in stories such as “Psychology” (1920), find their echo in speculations such as this, from J.W.N. Sullivan in The Atheneum: “If art is to survive, it must show itself worthy to rank with science; it must be as adequate, in its own way, as science. . . . What the new world will be like we do not know, but it is already apparent that it will be a bigger thing altogether than the pre-war world” (204). Mansfield never adopts the portentous tone of the self-declared male authority. She is more likely, in her non-fiction writing, to pose a question than to deliver a supposedly indisputable verdict.

Mansfield’s contributions to The Atheneum included a vast amount of literary reviews, mostly devoted to novels that no one reads nowadays. An exception is her much-discussed review of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919), which she damningly described as “Miss Austen up-to-date” (199), formally and thematically anachronistic in a destabilised post-war reality. Mourant rebuts the view that Mansfield’s involvement in The Athenaeum was marginal, her talents squandered on reviews of middlebrow fiction, and distorted by resentment and feelings of inadequacy. Mourant views Mansfield’s reviews as a liberating space in which, along with the letters she sent to Murry, she could develop and articulate her own aesthetic. Perhaps she also found the combative and comedic aspects of the reviewer’s art mentally stimulating. Like the TV reviews of Clive James or Graham Greene’s film criticism, the writing transcends its original purpose.

Mourant regards Mansfield’s support for Murry’s work on The Atheneum, a period during which she put her own fiction-writing on hold, as something close to co-editorship. If the predictions he made after her death, in The Adelphi, are anything to go by, she was an important corrective

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to his more outlandish convictions; in fifty years, or even ten, he opined, no one would bother reading either Mrs Dalloway or The Waste Land. Murry’s construction of Mansfield’s posthumous reputation as that of childlike genius is contextualised by Mourant within a more widespread literary project based on a romantic English nationalism, far removed from the internationalist aspirations of Rhythm—even if, as Mourant persuasively argues, the fiction Mansfield contributed to the magazine she co-edited exposed “a repressed violence behind the history of empire, counter to the ideological assumptions of the magazine” (158).

This rigorously theoretical yet always readable volume will be indispensable not only to those reading and studying Mansfield, but to anyone interested in the networks of writers, editors, thinkers and artists who constituted what we today understand as literary modernism. It is full of new angles on Mansfield’s work—for instance, her publication of fake translations she had herself composed in Rhythm. According to Mourant, there are still respected scholars who believe that “Boris Petrovsky” really existed. There are two important lessons to be learnt from this important study. One is that the potential meanings of a text—and especially a short story—are conditioned by the publishing context. The other is that although the act of writing is a solitary business, the generation and the editing of the finished text is at heart a collaborative process. These truths, exemplified by Katherine Mansfield, still apply today, and it is to be hoped that many other critics will follow in Mourant’s footsteps.

Ailsa Cox Edge Hill University

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Jochen Achilles is Professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany. His authored book publications include studies on the development of Sean O’Casey’s plays and on the interface between the gothic tradition and psychological fiction, focusing on Sheridan Le Fanu. He co-edited books on global challenges and regional responses in drama, on representations of evil in fiction and film, and on liminality and the short story. His research interests and numerous articles focus on cultural identities, the American short story, African American and Irish drama.

Hollie Adams is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of

Maine where she teaches contemporary North American fiction and Creative Writing. Her work on George Saunders (with Brian Jansen) has been previously published in the European Journal of American Studies.

Lisa Alther was born and grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, and now

lives in Tennessee and Vermont. She has published eight novels, a book of short stories, a narrative history of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, and two memoirs. They have been translated into seventeen languages, and four were New York TIMES bestsellers. Her novel Swan Song: An Odyssey came out in 2020.

Sharon Babb teaches English Language, Literature and Communication

Studies at a secondary school in Barbados. She received a PhD in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. Her research interests include migration, trauma and Barbadian fiction.

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Nassim Winnie Balestrini is Professor of American Studies and Intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria, and Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). Her publications and research interests include American literature and culture, adaptation and intermedial relations (as in her monograph From Fiction to Libretto: Irving, Hawthorne, and James as Opera, 2005, and in the edited volume Adaptation and American Studies, 2011), life writing across media (as in the essay collection Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies, 2018, edited with Ina Bergmann), intermedial hip-hop culture, climate change theater, US-American and Canadian theater and performance, contemporary poetry, and the poet laureate traditions in the United States and in Canada.

Yuhui Bao (primary author) is an Associate Professor in The College

of the Humanities, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and was a visiting scholar at the Department of English, University of Ottawa, from 2018 to 2019. She has published on the translations of classic Chinese literature and is currently working on the fiction of Alice Munro using the heuristic of Generative Anthropology.

Ina Bergmann is Associate Professor of American Studies at the

University of Würzburg, Germany. She is the author of two monographs, And Then the Child Becomes a Woman: Weibliche Initiation in der amerikanischen Kurzgeschichte 1865-1970 (2003) and The New Historical Fiction: The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed (2020). She has also (co-)edited several volumes of essays and special sections of journals, among them Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing (2015) and Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2018), as well as a frequent contributor to peer-reviewed journals and international book projects. She is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled A Cultural History of Solitude in the USA.

Stephen Bernstein is a professor of English at the University of

Michigan–Flint. He is the author of the book Alasdair Gray as well as numerous articles on a wide range of writers, including Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, and Charles Dickens.

Carmen Birkle is Professor of North American Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany and has taught at the universities of Mainz, Vienna, Bergen, Dijon, and at Columbia University in New York City. She was president, vice president, executive director, and international delegate of the GAAS and is co-editor of the journal Amerikastudien/American Studies. She is the author of Women’s Stories of the Looking Glass (1996), Migration – Miscegenation – Transculturation (2004), and of numerous articles as well

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as (co-)editor of fourteen volumes of essays. She is currently working on a monograph at the intersection of nineteenth-century American literature, culture, and medicine.

Christa Buschendorf was Professor and Chair of American Studies at

Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany from 1998 to 2015. Her fields of interest include transatlantic intellectual exchanges, the afterlife of antiquity in the US and classical myths in American literature. In her current research, she is exploring the approach of relational sociology to (African) American literature. With Cornel West she published Black Prophetic Fire (2014). She edited Power Relations in Black Lives: Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias (2018).

Beverly Lyon Clark is Professor of English and Women’s & Gender

Studies at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America and The Afterlife of “Little Women,” and she has edited or coedited works by or about Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Evelyn Sharp.

Ailsa Cox is Professor of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, UK. She

is the author of Alice Munro (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004); Writing Short Stories (Oxon: Routledge, 2005, 2nd edition 2016); Teaching the Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and, with Christine Lorre-Johnston, The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (Paris: Fahrenheit, 2015). Her own short fiction has been widely published and collected as The Real Louise and Other Stories (Wirral: Headland, 2009). She has also published book chapters focusing mostly on Alice Munro’s later stories, including “‘First and Last’: The Figure of the Infant in ‘Dear Life’ and ‘My Mother’s Dream’,” in Alice Munro: Critical Essays, eds. Gerald Lynch and Janice Fiamengo (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2015) and “‘Rage and Admiration’: Grotesque Humour in Dear Life,” in Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Runaway, Dear Life, ed. Robert Thacker (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). She has also published essays on other authors including Katherine Mansfield, Helen Simpson and Malcolm Lowry. She is the editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (Intellect Press), and the Deputy Chair of the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR).

Ian Dennis is a Professor in the Department of English, University of

Ottawa, and has published on Romantic-era Literature and other subjects.

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Ryan David Furlong is a PhD candidate in English and American literature at the University of Iowa specializing in early American and nineteenth-century literature, with particular research interests in the literature of slavery, African American autobiography, postsecular theory and criticism, religious experience and human personhood. His dissertation project looks at white and black anti-slavery writers’ engagements with the problem of evil, black doubt, and racial justice. He also works as a research assistant for The Walt Whitman Archive.

Rüdiger Kunow is Professor emeritus of American Studies at Potsdam

University, Germany. He served as speaker of the international research project “Transnational American Studies,” and director of the interdisciplinary research project “Cultures in/of Mobility” at the School of Humanities Potsdam University. His major research interests and publications focus on cultural constructions of human biology, and materialist cultural critique. He is the author of Material Bodies: Biology and Culture in the United States (2018).

Erik Redling is Professor of American Literature at the Martin Luther

University Halle-Wittenberg and Managing Director of the Muhlenberg Center for American Studies, which he founded in 2014. His main areas of interest include intermediality, jazz poetry, cognitive poetics, translation theories, film analysis, and dialect literature. He has published two monographs (Translating Jazz into Poetry: From Mimesis to Metaphor, 2017, and "Speaking of Dialect": Translating Charles W. Chesnutt's Conjure Tales into Postmodern Systems of Signification, 2006) and is (co-)editor of several anthologies, including Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Cultural Concepts and Transatlantic Intellectual Networks (2016) and Protestantism on Screen: Religion, Politics, and Aesthetics in European and American Movies (forthcoming). Currently he is working on a book about Zora Neale Hurston, dialect writing, and translation.

Jorge Sacido-Romero is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). His research in the last twelve years has focused mainly on modern and postmodern British short fiction, on which he has published several articles and (co-)edited volumes such as Modernism, Postmodernism and the Short Story in English (Rodopi, 2012), Gender and Short Fiction (Routledge, 2018) and Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction (Brill, forthcoming). He has supervised three projects on this topic funded by the Galician Regional Government (2008-2011) and the Government of Spain, the last one, still ongoing, Intersections (FEM2017-83084-P – AEI/FEDER). At present, he participates in the consortium Short Forms Beyond Borders (SFBB), funded by the European Union (Erasmus + KA203-CC1350A2). He is a member of the steering

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committee of the European Network for Short Fiction Research, and is also part of the Research Group Discourse & Identity (GRC2015/002 GI-1924) and the Research Network Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Literatures (RED2018-102678, AEI, FEDER, 2019).

Karima Thomas is an Associate Professor at the University of Angers

(France). She wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on Angela Carter’s subversion of authoritative discourses. Her main fields of research are short stories, feminism, readership, inter-mediality, the interaction between text and image in the short story. She is editorial assistant for the Journal of the Short Story in English in charge of book reviews.

Sarah Whitehead teaches English Language and Literature in London,

England. She has written on the short story, Edith Wharton and the Comic Gothic in various venues, including JSSE, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, European Journal of American Culture, The Edith Wharton Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the collected volume: The New Edith Wharton Studies. She recently (2020) published two hitherto unpublished Wharton short stories, “The Children’s Hour” and “A Granted Prayer” in the Times Literary Supplement and The Atlantic magazine respectively. Her current projects include a study of the early publication of James Joyce’s short stories in The Smart Set magazine.

Dr Simon Workman is Programme Director of the English and History

programme at Carlow College, St. Patrick’s, Ireland. He has published articles, chapters and reviews on modern Irish writing and culture in a number of different journals and collections, with his work appearing in the Irish University Review, Irish Studies Review and The Review of English Studies, Irish Literary Supplement and Poetry Ireland. He has recently co-edited, with Eoghan Smith, a collection of essays on the cultures of Irish suburbia entitled Imagining Irish Suburbia in Literature and Culture that was published by Palgrave in 2019.

Achevé d’imprimersur les presses de la reprographie

de l’université Rennes 2en mars 2021

Imprimé en France