Journal of the Short Story in English, 39

Journal of the Short Story in EnglishLes Cahiers de la nouvelle

39 | Autumn 2002Varia

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ForewordLinda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis

The Legendary Don Juan: A Possible Source for Chaucer’s “The Shipman’s Tale”Raychel Haugrud Reiff

“This thing was only designed for show and form”: The Vicissitudes of Resemblance inCongreve’s IncognitaAspasia Velissariou

Sleepwalking into the Nineteenth Century: Charles Brockden Brown’s “Somnambulism”Michael Cody

Drawing-Room Naturalism in Edith Wharton’s Early Short StoriesScott Emmert

Mourning and Melancholia in John Updike’s Short Story “His Mother Inside Him”Aristie Trendel

The Return to Shiloh: Family and Fantasy in Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh”Greg W. Bentley

Writing Between ‘Self’ and ‘Nation’: Nationalism, (Wo)manhood and Modernity in BessieHead’s The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village TalesKwadwo Osei‑Nyame Jnr

Identity in the Short Story Cycles of Lorrie MooreKaren Weekes

Journal of the Short Story in English, 39 | Autumn 2002

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Foreword

Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 It has been six years since the Journal of the Short Story in English began accepting

contributions on the origins of the short story and on pioneers in short fiction writing.

In the present issue three of the eight articles study such early writers of short fiction –

Chaucer, Congreve and Charles Brockden Brown. The remaining articles discuss more

contemporary well-known writers – Wharton and Updike – as well as some very recent

writers which we invite you to discover – Bessie Head, Bobbie Mason and Lorrie Moore.

AUTHORS

LINDA COLLINGE

JSSE Co-editors

EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS

JSSE Co-editors


2

The Legendary Don Juan: A PossibleSource for Chaucer’s “TheShipman’s Tale”

Raychel Haugrud Reiff

1 “Don Juan”, “Daun John”--the names sound almost identical. The first is the name of

the legendary Spanish seducer; the second is the name of Chaucer’s seducer in “The

Shipman’s Tale”. Although it is possible that choosing almost identical names for the

two libertines is merely coincidental, looking more closely at Chaucer’s story, it is clear

that there are additional similarities between the two works. For example, Chaucer’s

plot follows the traditional Don Juan story line: the male lover ingratiates himself into

the family of a beautiful woman, seduces the lady, abandons her, and goes merrily on

his way. Furthermore, the main character of Chaucer’s tale is very much like the

traditional Don Juan: both are charming, manipulative men who obtain love through

lies and deceits but are capable of talking their way out of trouble. Of course, even

though they have committed crimes against women, society, and the church, they feel

no guilt.

2 Even a cursory plot summary of Chaucer’s tale shows the remarkable similarities to the

Don Juan legend. A handsome, young, gracious French monk named Daun John is best

of friends with a merchant who has a beautiful but spendthrift wife. Always welcome at

their home, Daun John visits often and is loved by everyone. One day, in a secret

meeting with the wife, Daun John promises to give her money to pay her debts for

expensive clothes she has purchased, and she agrees to repay him with a night in bed.

Still feigning friendship with the husband, Daun John goes to him and asks to borrow

the money. As a true friend, the merchant loans him the money.

3 After both of them leave, Daun John, unknown to anyone, returns to the home with the

merchant's money, gives it to the wife, spends the night with her, and departs. When

next he sees the merchant, Daun John tells him that he repaid the loan, leaving the

money with his wife. After the gullible merchant mildly rebukes his wife for not telling

him of the repaid loan, the quick-thinking wife replies that she has already spent the

money which she thought was a gift from their friend and tells her husband she will


3

repay him with many happy nights. Thus the merchant has paid for a sexual liaison

between his wife and his friend, while Daun John has slept with a lady and lost nothing.

He is still seen as the good friend, gracious monk, and ideal man (Chaucer VII 1434).

With such striking similarities in name, plot, and character between Chaucer's Daun

John and the legendary Don Juan, it seems plausible that Chaucer, writing several

centuries before the first generally recognized writer of the Don Juan story, used the

Don Juan legend as a source for “The Shipman's Tale”. This fourteenth-century tale,

then, would be the earliest appearance of Don Juan in literary form.

4 Even though critics have long puzzled about Chaucer’s source for “The Shipman’s

Tale”, no one has mentioned the Don Juan legend as a possibility. For years, experts

focused on Boccaccio’s Decameron or Sercambi’s Novelle as Chaucer’s probable models

since the plots are similar (Benson, “Explanatory Notes” 910-911; Pratt 142-145, Tatlock

91, Guerin 412-419, McGrady 1-26).1 But others have questioned these works as sources,

stating that there is no proof that Chaucer knew either one (Benson and Andersson

277-278; Baugh 334).2 With these known tales discredited, critics have suggested that an

old, now lost, French fabliau was Chaucer’s source (Winnick 185, French 233; Benson

and Andersson 278, Baugh 334). However, most present experts dismiss this suggestion

as a mere guess rather than a serious explanation since no such work has ever

materialized (Winnick 184).3 Because no direct source can be found, many critics now

feel that Chaucer borrowed bits and pieces from a number of medieval sources and

wove them together to make an original work.4

5 The newest school of thought–that the tale is an original work drawn from many

medieval stories–opens the possibility that one source for “The Shipman's Tale” is the

legend of the libertine Don Juan.5

6 Chaucer certainly develops the monk into a typical Don Juan-like man. Like Don Juan,

he is seen by everyone as an ideal person. “Fair” (VII 25), “boold” (VII 25), and “yonge”

(VII 28), the monk ingratiates himself with the husband, claiming him for “cosynage”

(VII 36) and swearing eternal brotherhood (VII 42). To gain popularity in his household,

he generously gives money to everyone, even the leeste page” (VII 46). Courteous,

generous, and pleasing, the monk makes himself welcome at the merchant's home, and

everyone thinks he is a wonderful person.

7 But Chaucer quickly reveals that the monk, like Don Juan, is not what he appears to be.

Rather than a celibate, pure monk, he is a bawdy man whose thoughts easily turn to

sex. Improperly, he talks privately to the wife about her sexual life with her husband,

making crude comments about their busy nights when they “laboured” in bed (VII 108).

Like Don Juan, the monk acts in secrecy. He encourages the wife to tell him her

marriage troubles in “secree” (VII 130), and they “sworn” (VII 141) to never tell anyone

else. Like Don Juan, Daun John is a sweet-talking seducer. When he thinks he can win

the favors of the lady, he renounces his brotherhood with the merchant (VII 149-152),

announces to the wife that he has “loved [her] specially / Aboven all wommen” (VII

153-154), accepts her pledge to “doon to [him] what plesance and service / That [she]

may doon” (VII 191-192), and addresses her in knightly love terms by calling her "myn

owene deere lady” (VII 196).

8 Next Chaucer shows that, like Don Juan, he is an active sexual predator, a man of

action. Before sharing secrets, the monk and the wife “kiste" (VII 141), and to solidify

their promise, “he caughte hire by the flankes, / And hire embraceth harde, and kiste

her often” (VII 202-203).


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9 In the next scene, the monk, like Don Juan, is seen as a deceptive, cunning betrayer.

Having just plotted to have a sexual liaison with the wife, he conducts a religious

service, a “messe” (VII 25 1), eats the husband’s rich food (VII 254), twice blesses the

man he plans to betray (VII 259, 264), promises to give him anything he desires (VII

265-268), four times calls him by the endearing term “cosyn” (VII 257, 260, 264, 279),

borrows the money he needs from the husband to gain the wife’s favor (VII 269-280),

and pretends great friendship with the husband as they “drynke” (VII 297), “speke”

(VII 297), and “rome a while and pleye” (VII 297). The monk’s deceptive nature becomes

even more apparent when he returns to the merchant’s house to spend the night with

the wife with no one’s knowledge (VII 308-324) and later acts like a great friend,

entertaining the husband with “feeste and murye cheere” (VII 341) and once again

addressing him as “cosyn” (VII 364).

10 Also, like Don Juan, Daun John abandons his lover with no thought for her well-being.

His lack of concern is apparent when he tells the husband he has repaid the loan,

leaving the money with the merchant's wife (VII 349-360), who now has to try to

explain the situation to her husband without getting herself into trouble. Having had

his way with the lady and getting away with no penalty, Daun John, like Don Juan,

leaves town (VII 3 6 1).

11 Although it might be possible that the similarities in name, plot, and character are

merely accidental, such does not appear to be the case. Chaucer seems to deliberately

emphasize the name “Daun John” in his tale. Forty-one times Chaucer refers to the

seducer by using a noun, twenty-three of those times calling him the proper name,

“Daun John” (VII 43, 58, 68, 89, 98, 158, 187, 221, 255, 282, 294, 296, 298, 308, 312, 314,

319, 322, 337, 342, 349, 387, 402), while referring to him by his profession, "monk," only

eleven times (VII 25, 28, 34, 36, 62, 74, 124, 148, 195, 254, 402). Of the other seven

references, six times he is addressed with the endearing term “cosyn” by the gullible

merchant (VII 69, 98, 114, 143, 282, 387), and once he is called "deere love" by his lover

(VII 158). In contrast, Chaucer almost always talks about the other male protagonist,

the woman’s husband, whom he refers to with nouns thirty-five times, by using the

terms of his profession, calling him “merchant” seventeen times (Vll 1, 20, 53, 74, 75,

281, 296, 299, 302, 305, 307, 325, 332, 365, 377, 382, 427) and “chapman” four times (VII

226, 254, 256, 288). Sometimes he refers to his marital status, describing him as

“housbonde” four times (VII 161, 184, 199, 212) and “spouse” once (VII 425). Other

times Chaucer refers to his internal qualities, addressing him as “goode man” three

times (VII 29, 33, 107). The duplicitous monk addresses him using the endearing term

“cosyn” five times (VII 257, 260, 264, 279, 364). But his proper name, “Peter”, Chaucer

uses only once (VII 214). The third major character, the woman love-interest, is not

even given a proper name. Of the twenty-five times she is addressed, eighteen times

she is merely called “wyf” (VII 3, 22, 60, 92, 112, 124, 163, 212, 224, 241, 3 27, 357, 373,

378, 384, 395, 400, 430), twice she is “dame” (VII 356, 363), once she is “lady” (VII 196),

and four times the monk calls her “nece” (VII 100, 106, 125, 363).

12 Looking at it another way, of the twenty-four times Chaucer uses a proper name for his

characters, twenty-three are “Daun John”. With this emphasis, Chaucer forces the

reader to focus on the name “Daun John”, the name of the seducer. Although the other

two characters, the wife who is the object of Daun John's lust and the husband who is

the man who must be outwitted, are necessary to the plot, their names, obviously, are

unimportant. The womanizer Daun John, then, is the only character in the story whose


5

name is important. It surely seems possible that Chaucer expects his readers to identify

the seducer in his tale with the legendary womanizer, Don Juan.

13 Chaucer’s choice of the name “Daun John” for his protagonist of “The Shipman’s Tale”

seems intentional because it is not a name Chaucer uses in any other tale. To be sure,

there are characters with the common name “John” in other tales–Millers, Reeve’s, and

Summoners—and “John” is used as a general name for a cleric in various places in The

Canterbury Tales. But without the title “Daun”, the name does not have the connotations

of the legendary seducer–“John” is an ordinary male while “Daun John” is a libertine.

14 Another way Chaucer shows that he wants his readers to identify the monk with Don

Juan is that he uses the proper name “Daun John” more and more frequently as the

story progresses and the monk reveals his true nature. When Chaucer first introduces

the man, he is neutral, four times calling him by the term “monk” (VII 25, 28, 34, 36).

But as soon as the monk is shown to be a clever manipulator who knows how to win

people's affections, Chaucer begins calling him “Daun John”, doing so three times (VII

43, 58, 68) while calling him “monk” only twice (VII 62, 74). Chaucer continues using

the nouns in much the same way at the beginning of the seduction scene in the garden,

interweaving the two terms but using “Daun John” more frequently. The sequence is as

follows: “Daun John” (VII 89), “Daun John” (VII 98), “monk” (VII 124), “monk” (VII 148),

“Daun John” (VII 158), “monk” (VII 187), “Daun John” ( VII 195), “Daun John” ( VII 220),

“monk” (VII 254). Once this scene is completed and the monk puts his plan into action

by asking the merchant for the money, sleeping with the wife, and telling the merchant

he has repaid the loan, Chaucer refers to him almost exclusively as “Daun John”, using

the proper name fifteen times (VII 255, 282, 294, 296, 298, 308, 312, 314, 319, 322, 337,

342, 349, 387, 402). The only time he is called “monk” is when the deceived wife calls

him “false monk, daun John” (VII 402). This is the last time he is mentioned in the tale.

Thus, in over the last third of “The Shipman’s Tale”, after the monk has shown his true

nature as a deceptive libertine, Chaucer uses only the proper name “Daun John” to

refer to him, except for calling him a “false monk” once (VII 402). It seems most

probable that Chaucer’s readers would respond to this name by having a good laugh.

They, like present-day readers, would no longer see the man as a noble monk, for he is

“Daun John”, known currently as “Don Juan”, a libertine and a rake!

15 Clearly, “The Shipman’s Tale” has many similarities to the Don Juan legend in name,

plot, and characterization. But, is the legend of Don Juan as old as Chaucer? Could

Chaucer have known this legend? Would medieval people have known the story so that

they would have shared in Chaucer's humor, typecasting the French monk as a

womanizer as soon as they heard the name “Daun John”?

16 The tale of Don Juan as we know it today was first published in the early seventeenth

century under the title El Burlador de Sevilla, the work most critics cite as the first

literary appearance of Don Juan.6 A Spaniard, most likely Tirso de Molina, wrote of a

man of Seville who had one escapade after another with women. This story has been

further popularized by other writers, particularly Mozart in his opera Don Giovanni

(1787), Lord Byron in his epic satire Don Juan (1819-1824), and G. B. Shaw in the scene

“Don Juan in Hell” in Man and Superman (1903), as well as by Molière in his play Don Juan

(1665), Jose Zorrilla y Moral in his drama Don Juan Tenorio (1844), and Richard Strauss in

his tone poem Don Juan (1888) (“Don Juan”, Benet's; “Don Juan Tenorio”, Bleznick;

Grote). The story of a Spanish libertine from Seville named Don Juan is the story we

know today.


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17 But obviously Chaucer could not have known the Don Juan work written by Tirso de

Molina more than two centuries after his death. We need to examine whether Chaucer

could have known the tale in an earlier version. This, indeed, is a possibility. Critics

agree that the seventeenth-century Spanish play is based on a legend that began in

medieval times in Europe (critics do not cite a country of origin) and was common

folklore. One critic writes, “Don Juan was a figure in the folklore of many European

countries before he first appeared in literature in the play El burlador” (Bleznick).

Others add that Don Juan is a tale “originating in popular legend” (“Don Juan”,

Britannia) “in Europe during the Middle Ages” (Sieber). That the legend was well-known

can be seen in the number of literary pieces published in the seventeenth century,

works depicting a libertine named Don Juan who was Spanish or French or Italian,

depending on the nationality of the author.7 Therefore, it seems very possible that

Chaucer could have heard this tale about a man named “Daun John” of France or “Don

Juan” of Spain or Italy, or similar names from almost any European country. Thus, as

late as the mid-seventeenth century, Don Juan was not necessarily Spanish, nor was his

occupation of any importance. He was merely an unscrupulous womanizer. Chaucer’s

libertine, a French monk, was a perfectly acceptable Don Juan character in the late

fourteenth century.

18 Since he was a well-traveled man, Chaucer had many opportunities to hear legends

known throughout Europe. We certainly would imagine that this great story writer

would have been attuned to stories that he heard as he journeyed from country to

country, traveling to France with the English army in 1359-60, to Spain on “affairs

touching the forthcoming war” in 1366, to Milan with Prince Lionel in 1367, to the

continent on matters touching the war with France in 1370, to Genoa and Florence in

1372-73, to the continent at least three times on matters of peace and the king’s

marriage in 1376-77, to France to arrange the king’s marriage in 1377, to Lombardy in

1378, and to Calais in 1387 (Howard 506-509). To all of these places Chaucer traveled

before writing the second phase of Canterbury Tales in 1389-93, the section which begins

with “The Shipman's Tale” (Howard 509).

19 Even if the tale originated in Spain, which is not at all certain, Chaucer still had the

opportunity to hear it. After all, Chaucer traveled to Spain in 1366 to support Don

Pedro. Here he would have had the opportunity to hear of the Don Juan legendary

figure (Howard 114).8 Also, he and his wife knew John of Gaunt’s Spanish wife,

Constance, daughter of Don Pedro of Spain. In fact, Philippi, Chaucer’s wife, was in

service to the Duchess Constance; this surely could have provided another opportunity

for Chaucer to hear of the Spanish dissolute lover (Howard 507). Furthermore, as

controller of export tax and customs for years beginning in 1374 (Rossignol 74),

Chaucer had the opportunity to meet and talk with people from all over Europe, people

who could have told him the legend of Don Juan. Chaucer, traveling in many countries

in Europe, including Spain, and meeting with foreigners at home, could have heard the

Don Juan legend that began in Europe during medieval times and was common folklore.

20 Chaucer also establishes that the speaker of the tale, the Shipman, could have heard of

the Don Juan story, since it is a legend known throughout Europe. Like Chaucer, the

Shipman travels widely, including taking trips to Spain. He is from “Deartemouth” (I

389) in the southwest corner of England and has traveled fom “Hulle” (I 404) on the

Yorkshire Coast to “Cartage” (I 404), referrring either to a city in Tunisia or to

Cartagena in Spain;9 he knows every inlet in “Britaigne” (I 409), Brittany, and in


7

“Spayne”. Such a well-traveled man certainly had access to the story of Don Juan. Also,

since he is a rugged, daring sailor, he would probably appreciate the story of a

handsome, dashing man who is able to steal what he wants (in this case the favors of a

woman) and get by without being caught. It makes a perfect fabliau for the Shipman to

tell.

21 It seems, then, that Chaucer does have a source for “The Shipman’s Tale” and that

people living in the late fourteenth century were treated to the first known work of

literature based on the Don Juan legend: a fabliau set in France telling the tale of a

lecherous monk, Chaucer’s “The Shipman’s Tale”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baugh, Albert C. “The Shipman’s Tale”. Chaucer’s Major Poetry. Ed. Albert C. Baugh. Englewood

Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 334.

Benson, Larry D. “Explanatory Notes: “The Shipman’s Tale”. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D.

Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Riverside, 1987. 910-913.

Benson, Larry D. “Textual Notes: Fragment 1 (Group A)”. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D.

Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Riverside, 1987. 23-86.

Benson, Larry D. and Theodore M. Andersson. The Literaty Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux:Text and

Translations. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

Bleznick, Donald W. “Don Juan”. Encyclopedia Americana International Edition, 1993.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. 3rd ed, Boston: Riverside, 1987.

Davenport, W. A. Chaucer and His English Contemporaries. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Donaldson, E. T. Chaucer’s Poetry. 2nd ed. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1975.

“Don Juan”. Britannia. 1987.

“Don Juan”. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. 3rd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

“Don Juan Tenorio”. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. 3 rd ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

French, Robert Dudley. A Chaucer Handbook. 2 nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Croft, 1947.

Grote, David. Common Knowledge: A Reader’s Guide to Literary Allusions. New York: Greenwood,

1987.

Guerin, Richard. “The Shipman’s Tale: The Italian Analogues”. English Studies 52 (1971): 412-419.

Howard, Donald R. Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World. 2nd ed. New York: Fawcett Columbine,

1987.

McGrady, Donald. “Chaucer and the Decameron Reconsidered”. Chaucer Review 12 (1977-78): 1-26.

Peyre, Henri. “Don Juan”. Encyclopedia Americana International Edition, 1993.


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Pratt, Robert A. “Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Sercambi”. Modern Language Notes 55 (1940):

142-145.

Rank, Otto. The Don Juan Legend. Trans. and ed. David G. Winter. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.

Rossignol, Rosalyn. Chaucer A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Works. New York:

Facts on File, 1999.

Sieber, Harry. “Don Juan”. World Book Encyclopedia. 1992.

Singer, Armand E. The Don Juan Theme: An Annotated Bibliography of Versions, Analogues, Uses,

and Adaptations. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia UP, 1993.

Tatlock, J. S. P. The Mind and Art of Chaucer. Syracuse, 1950.

Winnick, R. H. “Luke 12 and Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale”. Chaucer Review 3 0.2 (1995): 164-190.

NOTES

1. . Benson states: “The closest extant analogue is Boccaccio’s Decameron 8.1 (8.2 is a similar

story). A version preserved in Sercambi’s Novella 19… perhaps gave Chaucer some ideas… Guerin

(ES 52, 1971, 412-19) suggests that he used all three Italian versions” (Benson, Explanatory Notes

910).

2. . Even though Benson and Andersson see a resemblance to Boccaccio’s and Sercambi’s works,

they declare that there is no evidence that Chaucer knew the Decameron or Sercambi’s Novelle

(277-278). Baugh agrees: “A similar story is told by Boccaccio in the Decameron (the first story of

the eighth day and by Sercambi in his Novelle (No. 19), but it is unlikely that Chaucer knew either

of these collections” (334).

3. . According to Winnick, “The lost French fabliau argument was first advanced by John Webster

Spargo in Chaucer’s Shipmans Tale: The Lover’s Gift Regained, Folklore Fellows Communications, No.

91 (Helsinki, 1930 (Winnick 185). French speculates that the tale may be drawn from a French

fabliau (233). Benson and Andersson cite a lost French fabliau as a possible source (278). Baugh

writes: “Chaucer’s source was probably an old French fabliau which has not come down to us”

(334). However, none of these authors is certain that a French fabliau ever existed. Winnick

himself states that critics should “call off the search for the tale's missing fabliau source, almost

verbatim or otherwise, for that source probably does not and never did exist” (184).

4. . Benson and Andersson point out that “Chaucer alone is probably responsible for the most

notable characteristics of this tale” (278), while French states that there is no direct source for

this tale (233).

That Chaucer uses a variety of plots in this tale seems to be the most prevalent view at the

present time. See McGrady; Davenport; Donaldson; Benson and Andersson; and Winnick.

McGrady states that Chaucer’s “use of models was a complex one, normally consisting of the

amalgamation of elements from several sources” (10-11). Davenport reiterates this idea: “This

uncertainty about origins [for many tales including “The Shipman’s Tale” suggests that Chaucer’s

tales of contemporary life were versions of anecdotes and tales in general circulation, that is,

literary versions of the oral and improvisatory” (74). Donaldson sees that this tale is “a very old

folk-tale known as ’The Lover’s Gift Regained’, which appears in many languages and in many

versions” (1095). Benson and Andersson publish a number of variations on the tale. And Winnick

talks about the possibility that Chaucer used a number of different sources for the tale, thus

creating “an important and original work taking the outward form of a familiar comic genre”

(165).


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5. . Armond E. Singer, who compiled a bibliography of works containing the Don Juan theme,

recognizes Chaucer’s “Shipman’s Tale” as one work having a Don Juan-like figure written before

1623 when Tirso de Molina wrote the Burlador (Singer 4).

6. . Most critics consistently state that Don Juan’s first appearance in any literary form was in

Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador, which was written, according to some critics, as early as 1616 or,

according to other critics, as late as 1630. See “Don Juan”, Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Grote, and

Bleznick.

However, Otto Rank cites an earlier work as the original: “The oldest appearance of Don Juan in

world literature is a Spanish comedy, now apparently lost, that appeared about the end of the

sixteenth century. The Burlador is a slightly altered form of this play” (Rank 103).

7. . Peyre, of Yale University, says that the French dramatist Molière, writing his play Don Juan in

1664 “was probably unaware of the original Spanish play (published 1630) by the monk Tirso de

Molina and of an Italian adaptations of the Spanish work, but he may have been familiar with two

French adaptations of the Italian version--by Claude de Villiers in 1659 and Nicolas Dorimond in

1661”.

8. . Clearly Chaucer knew of the Spanish ruler Don Pedro since Chaucer journeyed to Spain in

1366 to support his cause. Later Chaucer praised him in “The Monk’s Tale”.

9. . See Benson, “Textual Notes” 30, note 404.

ABSTRACTS

Le présent article remet en cause la thèse selon laquelle Don Juan apparaît pour la première fois

en littérature dans une Comedia espagnole du XVIe siècle. L’hypothèse selon laquelle Chaucer est

le premier auteur à utiliser la légende médiévale du fond folklorique occidental de Don Juan pour

créer Daun John, moine séducteur du “Shipman’s Tale”, n’est pas à exclure. Le triangle

traditionnel du mari, de la femme et de l’amant évoque, dans ce conte, nombre de détails de la

légende médiévale de Don Juan que Chaucer, grand voyageur devant l’éternel, peut avoir

entendu lors de ses périples. Chez Chaucer, la femme est abandonnée par Daun John qui, comme

le Don Juan de la légende, est séducteur, manipulateur et trompeur. Si Chaucer répète vingt-trois

fois le nom de Daun John (alors qu’il mentionne une seule fois le nom du mari et laisse la femme

anonyme) c’est probablement pour établir un lien entre la légende médiévale et son récit. Si, en

effet, Chaucer tire son personnage de Daun John de la légende de Don Juan, alors le moine

séducteur du “Shipman’s Tale” est bien la première apparition en littérature de Don Juan.

AUTHORS

RAYCHEL HAUGRUD REIFF

Raychel Haugrud Reiff is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-

Superior, where she teaches courses in British Literature, including Chaucer. She has published

articles in a number of journals, including The Explicator, North Dakota Quarterly, English Record,

and Statement.


10

“This thing was only designed forshow and form”: The Vicissitudes ofResemblance in Congreve’s Incognita

Aspasia Velissariou

EDITOR'S NOTE

Traduit par Jean-Thomas Rieux

1 William Congreve’s novella, Incognita (1692), has received a number of formalist

readings that usually focus on the ways in which it reproduces or distances itself from

the author’s own critical concerns and artistic design as expressed in his preface1. Such

readings provide interesting insights into the complexities of the plot and the use of a

self-conscious narrator whose central function is to constantly undercut claims to the

truth of the story. By correctly emphasizing the lack of the author’s concern for

realism, they draw attention to the aesthetic standards that he aspires to meet.

Predictably, however, because they are circumscribed by the self-referential and meta-

fictional terms that the authorial voice inscribes, formalist approaches end up full-

circle: They reconfirm their methodological assumptions of the artificial and/or purely

aesthetic character of the novella. Incognita may be a “pleasing artifice which has been

so aware of its own construction”2, but it is more than a mere exercise in formal

excellence.

2 In his complex analysis, Michael McKeon eschews the formalist pitfall by arguing that

Incognita combines an epistemological critique of romance truth with the interrogation

of the aristocratic ideology of inherited status. Because I consider his argument

important to my own reading, I shall refer to it at length, albeit selectively. McKeon

draws attention to the extreme gullibility of Congreve’s heroes whose idealizing

delusions derive from romance, and as such they are satirized by authorial intrusion.

Pointing out the “implausible resolutions”3 to which the narrative gives rise, he

remarks that it is precisely the narrator’s vociferous claims to the truth of the story,


11

sustained by authenticating narrative devises, that raise suspicions of his role as

recorder of truth. Doubts as to his reliability are reinforced by the discovery that the

protagonist’s struggle to marry the woman he loves (and not the bride destined by his

father) was for naught since there was never a “real” problem in the first place. In

other words, the conflict between Aurelian’s love for Incognita and his duty to his

father to marry Juliana (for the sake of peace between two families in ancient

animosity) had been resolved from the outset: Incognita was Juliana, but the truth of

her identity had been disguised by the author. Consequently, the heroes’ progressive

right to the free choice of partner has proved to be as unfounded as their problem4. The

resolution by which marriage for love ultimately coincides with dynastic continuity

may have a salutary effect on alliance but for this very reason it does not jeopardize

patriarchal order.

3 My reading of Incognita concentrates on the heroes’ peculiar characteristic, namely,

their proneness to mistake which I see as a result of their permanent misreading of

signs. While McKeon attributes their credulousness to the précieuse fantasies of love

that the romance promotes (and Congreve parodies), I argue that their constant

blunders derive from their overreliance on similitude as the organizing principle of

signification. The novella emphatically inscribes reading in terms of similitude as a

source of error insofar as similitude establishes perception on the basis of an

unproblematic reflection between sign and “object.” I want to maintain that similitude

is overall responsible for the fancies and illusions to which the protagonists fall prey,

because it represents an essentially antiquated mode of perceiving the organization

and operation of signs. In The Order of Things Michel Foucault argues for the important

epistemological break in Western thought which he locates in the declining status of

similitude as instrumental in, and productive of, knowledge. Similitude played a

significant role in knowledge until the end of the sixteenth century insofar as during

the Renaissance the sign was constituted by resemblance because it functioned as a

sign only to the extent that it resembled the thing that it indicated. Therefore, it was

perceived as ternary, namely, the articulation of the marks, the content that they

indicated, and the similitude between the marks and the things they designated.

However, as Foucault argues, by the beginning of the seventeenth century similitude

becomes responsible for confusion because it emerges as the cause of error while, at

the same time, it is increasingly marginalized by being associated with imagination5.

4 My argument is that Incognita exposes a crisis in similitude, which, significantly,

traverses those signs that par excellence register aristocratic ideology, thus indicating a

pathological dysfunction at its patriarchal core as this is crystallized around alliance

and idealized masculinity. In this sense, there is an analogy, but more importantly an

interrelationship, between aristocratic ideology and similitude insofar as both inform a

way of perceiving and organizing experience that is clearly shown to be antiquated and

therefore inadequate. Nonetheless, the destabilization that signification undergoes,

exemplified by the heroes’ constant misreading of signs, is finally recuperated in the

same way that patriarchy survives almost intact. For all their ignorance of the true

identities of their lovers, the heroes have, after all, correctly identified them. Once

restored, their identities are found to be in correct correspondence to rank, the central

stake in the politics of the novella. That chance willed it so shows the inherent

weakness of the ideology that Incognita inscribes but significantly also its tenacity:

chance has worked for its improvement.


12

5 Congreve sets the first meeting of the two lovers, Aurelian and Incognita, in a masked

ball. In their witty exchange about the connection between appearance and reality

Aurelian supports his position that there is an intrinsic correspondence between

external marks (apparel) and essence (mind) as follows: “Yet I cannot help defending

an opinion, in which now I am more confirmed, that probable conjectures may be made

of the ingenious disposition of the mind, from the fancy and choice of apparel,” to

which Incognita responds,

The humour I grant ye... or constitution of the person... but I should hardly pass my

censure upon so slight an indication of wit for there is your brisk fool as well as

your brisk man of sense... I confess, ‘tis possible a fool may reveal himself by his

dress... but a decency of habit, which is all that men of best sense pretend to, may

be acquired by custom and example without putting the person to a superfluous

expense of wit for the contrivance6.

6 Aurelian concedes Incognita’s point rather too eagerly insofar as, as he notes

subsequently, there may be many ”good fancies” and “faces” which may be “borrowed

and adulterate,” his own costume having been “borrowed” precisely like his own

identity (he pretends he is his friend Hippolito). However he does not really respond to

the very premise of her argument, namely, the cultural contingence of signs that makes

extremely unsafe assumptions of their unmediated connection with (and therefore

intrinsic correspondence to) the “thing” they signify. The arbitrariness of the signifier

is suggested in Incognita’s witty remark that “by your maxim I cannot discover one fool

in the company, for they are all well dressed” (482). Likewise, the narrator refuses us

the description of her dress presumably because he, too, thinks that apparel is not a

sure sign of wit, thus playfully acquiescing in her own maxim.

7 It is worth noting, however, that Aurelian seeks to validate his argument on the basis of

the key term “probable conjectures”. He grounds his case on conjecturing, that is,

reasoning from external to internal and from evident to nonevident by means of

“probable signs”, that is, those effects that lead us to probable inferences as to their

causes. Conjecturing on the basis of probable signs represents the dominant type of

reasoning well into the eighteenth century but, as Foucault notes, signs no longer

signified necessarily in terms of their similitude to the “thing” they indicated7. In

Incognita conjecturing proves to be an unsafe kind of reasoning by being associated

with romantic fancy and idealized notions of male honour in both friends. Aurelian

falls in love with the “shape, wit and air” of the masked Incognita ”together with a

white hand he had seen (perhaps not accidentally)... And for her face, which he had not

seen, he bestowed upon her the best his imagination could furnish him with” (483).

When later Incognita gives him the choice either of telling him who she is or of seeing

her face, the hero opts for the latter. In the narrator’s parodying language of romance

“nature seemed here to have played the plagiary, and to have moulded into substance

the most refined thoughts of inspired poets” (491). The female face serves as a

stabilizer of love in the romantic discursive practices of the male protagonists because

both of them assume that surface similarities are imprints of nature and, therefore,

sure guides to the truth of the beloved8.

8 On being found by Aurelian disguised as a youth, Incognita starts the story of her life as

follows: “I am sensible they [strange circumstances] are such that I shall not blame

your severest conjectures, but I hope to convince you when you shall hear what I have

to say in justification of my virtue”, to which Aurelian answers: “Justification... what

infidel dares doubt it!… May I trust my sight, or does my fancy now only more strongly


13

work? For I do still preserve your image in my heart...” (513). Incognita presumes that

Aurelian may have justifiably drawn unflattering inferences about her nature (“virtue”)

from a number of probable signs (her being found in male disguise alone with a strange

man in the dark). But, because Aurelian reads signs as probable only to the extent that

they resemble what they indicate, the revelation of her face (“her perfections”)

ironically protects him from the implications of “probable conjunctures”. That he

adheres to this reasoning proves to be yet another of his numerous illusions because, to

him, there is no possible discontinuity between his lover’s face and her virtue; neither

is there indeed between her words and truth, a liability that the narrator carefully

points out in his wry warning to the reader “not to believe every word which she told

him, nor that admirable sorrow she counterfeited to be accurately true” (515). In the

context of romantic love, that draws its validity from sight and fancy, “proper”

reasoning can only be parodic and “true” identities are redundant or even unwelcome.

They destroy romantic delusion by socially contextualizing desire. In this sense,

Aurelian’s choice for his lover’s face rather than the name is not only dramatically

pivotal to the unfolding of the plot (at this point Incognita’s true name would have

terminated the narrative) but, also, exemplary of the mythopoiea of desire that

Congreve parodies.

9 Central to this mythopoiea is the mystification of woman as the unknowable (“the

incognita”/ Incognita), woman as mystery, registered in Incognita’s permanent

concealment by masks, veils and disguises and finally woman as a riddle that man is

invited to decipher and always fails. As Robert Markley has shown, this mystification of

femaleness is typical of Congreve, coexisting here, too, with familiar generalizations as

to what women “truly” are9. For example, Leonora is reduced by the narrator to

essential femininity -- “in the bottom a very woman” (500) – when she instantly falls in

love with Aurelian although she never saw his face but only read his letter (written in

reality by Hippolito but signed as Aurelian). As the narrator says, “the spirit... of Eve”

has entered Leonora who, although aware that Aurelian is destined for her friend,

Juliana, decides “to dress herself to the best of her advantage and... to kill him

downright” (500-01). To the reader who may wonder how it is possible for a woman to

fall in love with a man she never saw, the narrator cynically asserts that “a woman may

be taken with the character and description of a man... and though she cannot imagine

his real features or manner of wit... she has a general notion of what is called a real

gentleman” (501).

10 Women are as prone as men to romantic fancy that constructs staple desire which

turns its object, or indeed any object, to an indiscriminate recipient of prefabricated

emotion. Therefore, the identity of the beloved is not important to Leonora either,

because what count are preconceived notions of masculinity, that is, fictions of gender

and the extent to which the beloved complies with them. The narrator has already

prepared us for Leonora’s indiscriminate liking of what is in fact a fictional object10.

When later on she realizes that she mistook Hippolito for Aurelian, she easily shifts her

love to the former because “his person was altogether as agreeable, his estate and

quality not at all inferior, to Aurelian’s” (523). The main difference, however, lies in the

signs that trigger desire. It is female beauty that constructs male desire by being

registered either in the face as an idealistic image (a “heavenly form”) that is stamped,

for example, on Hippolito’s “soull” (496), or in the feminine body as physical attraction

– the touch of Leonora’s hand causes “a successive warmth and chilliness” in his heart

(486). By contrast, the face is wholly discredited in Leonora’s desire for “Aurelian”


14

because man’s “real features” do not count in a woman’s preference but only

generalized notions of character which coincide with the definition of “a fine

gentleman.” Leonora’s passion for the fictitious Aurelian is triggered by signs of

excellence that inscribe “gentleman,” rather than by idealized physicality. Thus, female

desire appears as inherently determined by hierarchical signs of rank centered in

“birth.” This is obvious from Leonora’s subsequent appreciation of Hippolito’s status

that is found to be equal to Aurelian’s. Although her “violent passion” for the fictitious

Aurelian is clearly shown to be the product of “her active fancy” (506-07), and, as such,

it is relegated to the area of unreasonable liking, her choice is, after all, accurate. As the

narrator asserts, Hippolito is as good as his friend: “So that, although Leonora was

indeed mistaken, she could not be said to be much in the wrong” (501). She might have

been mistaken in the identity of her lover but her reasoning has proved to be solid

because her understanding of the general character of “gentleman” was based on signs

that formulate decorums, rank being the crucial one. Probable signs are therefore

reconfirmed by the conservative notion of decorum11 that also justifies Leonora’s lack

of discrimination in the object of her desire insofar as both men do not “disagree with

that character” (501).

11 This is a typical instance of Congreve’s position in the novella. While he throws into

relief the heroes’ inherently flawed perception of identities, by the same gesture he

rescues them from the implications of their constant misreadings. As with Leonora, so

with Aurelian it turns out that wrong identities do not necessarily signify bad

selections. In reality, both of them end up making a perfectly decorous choice of lovers.

Decorum serves the restabilization of a universe of disordered signification by

reconfirming rank as an outstanding sign of character. The game of concealed

identities had already been circumscribed by decorum, as the central paradigm of the

masked Incognita, who is Juliana, clearly illustrates. Because disguise was always

harmonized with rank it never really threatened order as personal preference always

coincided with the interests of alliance. Decorum marks the limits of Congreve’s

interrogation of the antiquated ideology of inherited status that he clearly shows to be

at an impasse. This essentially ideological recuperation, however, does not develop as

smoothly with the fallacies of the male protagonists. Congreve focuses on their

blunders because of their centrality as heirs to the male line of inheritance and

privilege. He associates their fallacious reading of signs with aristocratic

misconceptions of male honor, which he parodies. At the same time, however, he

inscribes their propensity to error as a liability that could potentially jeopardize their

own genealogical position. The latter retains its ideological validity because it arises as

the only constant in the chaotic signification that the young heroes construct on the

basis of similitude.

12 Misidentification caused by dress describes the heroes’ perception of the sign as

unproblematically leading to the knowledge of the object that it marks. As Incognita

compulsively indicates, habits are not to be trusted as the “probable” sign of anything

insofar as their permanent function is disguise, the sign par excellence of deceiving

appearances. Habits are not only unreliable but also treacherous because they lead to

wrong inferences about identities insofar as they are associated with fancy rather than

discrimination. “Fancying he saw the glimmering of diamond buttons,” that Hippolito

wears on his sleeves, Aurelian comes to the assistance of a man engaged in defending

himself against two assailants. It turns out that both the hero and the assailants were

mistaken as to the identity of the wounded, Claudio, “grounding their mistake upon the


15

habit”(493): the habit belongs to Lorenzo, but was worn by Hippolito and subsequently

by Claudio. The diamond buttons are misleading synecdoches not only of the “real”

person, but significantly, also, of his multiple duplications. In his description of the

masked ladies, the narrator emphatically inscribes “dress” as synonymous with

deceptive appearances (“art”) that conceal “nature.” However, the male protagonists

“conclude from these apparent perfections that there was not a mask which did not at

least hide the face of a cherubim” (480). But cherubims do not differ, and neither do the

two friends (“both well dressed”) in the ladies’ favorable impressions12. Dress levels

individualities constructing a number of overlapping mirror images on which identities

are reflected as a mirage. As such, and contrary to the heroes’ reading of it, it stands as

a sign of the destabilized identities that the novella describes as substitutions.

13 This overlapping of identities is central to Congreve’s pact with his reader. Because he

writes a novella that parodies romance, he has necessarily to establish those romance

presuppositions that form the matrix of his own critique. The doubling of self (like

impersonation and disguise) is an important part of these presuppositions13 but, by

being identified with mistaken identities ad infinitum, it turns into an emblem of severe

fallacy. Thus, while Incognita incorporates the familiar topos of disguise in the form of

wrong dress, it empties it of the generic assumption of self-transformation and the

implication that it represents the antithesis to truth14. Wrong costumes are simply an

occasion of erroneous identifications deriving from an embarrassing adherence to

similitude as a reflection of the real. More importantly, however, Congreve employs the

notion of similitude as reflection to describe aristocratic ideology in the crucial areas of

the family, genealogical status and honorable maleness15. By the same token, similitude

underscores a crisis in the very signs that constitute that ideology exposing it as an

antiquated and therefore inadequate system of identification. Foucault notes of

reflection in aemulatio (one of the forms that similitude takes) that

by duplicating itself in a mirror the world abolishes the distance proper to it; in this

way it overcomes the place allotted to each thing. But which of these reflections...

are the original images? Which is the reality and which the projection? It is often

not possible to say.16

14 This statement registers the vicissitudes in aristocratic signification that the novella

displays and which originate in the crucial level of patrilineal succession. The latter is

perceived as the biological duplication of father in son. As such it represents the

abolition of the son’s own “allotted” place by the patriarchal logic that assimilates

individuality, and the distancing that the latter presupposes, into genealogical

continuity in which each male generation mirrors another ad infinitum.

15 Significantly Incognita opens with the positioning of Aurelian in terms of ancestry,

status and wealth that construct class privilege. Genealogy not only serves as a

hierarchical index but, also, introduces the principles that dictate aristocratic

signification. This is evident from the outset when the narrator describes the way in

which Don Fabio perceives his son, “whom he now began to look upon as the type of

himself: an impression he had made in the gaiety and vigour of his youth, before the

rust of age had debilitated and obscured the splendour of the original.” And he wonders

whether the father’s emotionality, when looking at his son, “ were for regret at the

recollection of his former self, or for the joy he conceived in being... revived in the

person of his son” (475-76). Don Fabio sees Aurelian as his faithful copy, but, more

importantly, the son stands as his father’s “signature.” In the universe of patrilineal

signification the son is perceived as the father’s own imprint, that is, in terms of the


16

most rigorous form of similitude that constructs son (copy) as his father’s (original)

qualities impressed upon him through birth. Physical resemblance marks the son’s life

as a natural extension of the father’s; thus it displays the reproduction and

safeguarding of inherited status and wealth as a political urgency that the generation

of male offspring serves. That Don Fabio is also “revived in the person of his son” in the

crucial aspect of the regeneration of the line of property is implied by the narrator’s

comment on the old man’s large income.

16 At the same time, the mirroring of father in son triggers off two others that also

inscribe aristocratic bonds: the mirroring of Aurelian in Hippolito --who is seen by

Aurelian “as his second self” because of “resemblance in feature and proportion”

(476)17 – and of Lorenzo in Hippolito (by means of the former’s apparel). This game of

swapping identities in which the two friends mirror each other but also duplicate

others reaches an impasse when Hippolito realizes that Aurelian’s idea to impersonate

him by taking his own name was unlucky. Wishing to clarify misunderstandings, and on

his friend’s advice to make use in turn of his own name, Hippolito writes a letter to

Leonora and signs it as Aurelian. This letter complicates things further as the narrator

ironically anticipates: “They at last argued themselves into a belief that fortune had

befriended them with a better plot than their regular thinking could have contrived”

(497). Hippolito’s admission to Leonora that “I appeared to be other than myself... I was

not then myself, nor am I now my own” (498) begs the question of what his true self is,

or, for that matter, whether there is such a self. In the novella, name, far from

functioning as a stabilizer of disordered signification, reinforces the overlapping of

identities and their innumerable substitutions that describe the aristocratic delight in

the game of appearances, dissimulation and disguise. That the restoration of name is a

requirement for the restoration of hierarchical order will be a further concern. Suffice

it to stress here that the complicity of name in these games that draw their magic from

similitude marks the heroes’ lack of discrimination between resemblance and illusion.

However, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, “the chimeras of similitude

loom up on all sides, but they are recognized as chimeras”18 because discrimination

arises as one of the main activities of the mind; the identities of things are established

through the examination of differences. Aurelian and Hippolito are shown to be devoid

of this discriminating function of the mind as the episode of the tilting makes

embarrassingly clear.

17 This episode is central to Congreve’s critique of the aristocratic ideology of chivalric

maleness and the attendant notions of honor that the two friends embody. The crux

lies again in the shift in resemblance that, from a source of knowledge, is firmly located

on the side of fancy. The inability of Aurelian and Hippolito to perceive this shift is

exposed in the form of quixotic delusions of masculine feats that are properly ridiculed

by the narrator. Moreover, this very inability is not limited to a personal liability but

extends to a wider signifying crisis that makes aristocratic codes literally unreadable by

its own members. The two friends participate in the tilting staged to honor the beauty

of Donna Catherina in the public celebration of her marriage to Don Ferdinand, under

the mistaken impression that it is a real combat. But although “the thing was only

designed for show and form” (503) they typically read the signs that construct the show

as ternary; in reality, they treat similitudes as both the marks and the contents they

indicate, thus they collapse their articulation into a single form. The narrator describes

the costumes and accessories of chivalric maleness in a mock-heroic language that

underscores the two heroes’ inane display of championship of their mistresses’ beauty.


17

They are unable to discriminate chimeras from reality because they see this show of

masculine competition as a reflection of an essential maleness constructed by

aristocratic concepts of honor, bravery and aggression. This necessarily involves the

mystification of woman whose signs cannot be read, as with Donna Catherina’s picture,

which, painted on a shield, cannot be deciphered by the two friends. “Not knowing her

picture” (504) they apologize for having unwittingly insulted her beauty, although they

do not offer any explanation regarding their misreading of the gold inscription on the

shield “Above the Insolence of Competition.” But it is precisely this misreading of the

written sign, as effected by their privileging of the word “competition” to the exclusion

of the overall meaning, that triggers the chivalric vindication of their mistresses’

beauty. In reality, their misunderstanding of the inscription is essentially ideological

because it is predicated on competitive notions of manhood that the two friends

sustain.

18 Their adherence to this masculine ideal also prescribes their response to the choice

offered to them either to acknowledge publicly their mistake or enter a combat. They

opt for the latter because “they could not decline the combat, being pressed to it

beyond an honourable refusal” (503). It is not accidental that their honorable ethics

take the form of blindness and as such they expose as antiquated the ideology in which

they are embedded. That chivalry is only good for show and useful as a mere spectacle

devoid of the values that had once made it meaningful indicates a shift in the official

aristocratic ideology that Incognita inscribes in Don Ferdinand. The pragmatism and

political flexibility of the latter is obvious in his use of compromise as a resolution of

conflict. That this resolution excludes armed confrontation becomes graphically clear

in the blunted lances that the two cavaliers were ordered to use (although they were

“all in good earnest”) and in the forbidding of swords. This “mock fight” was true only

in the two ladies’ “tender breasts” (504) and as such it inscribes a contradiction in the

ideology that it enacts: The mock fight describes the collapse of ancient aristocratic

ethos; that the latter is staged as a compromised show indicates a certain potential of

ideological self-transcendence.

19 Congreve uses for his setting “a rather stock Italy”19 in order to expose the inherent

pathology of the patriarchal system that in Italy appears at its preposterous extremes

but it is not alien either to English aristocratic practices. After giving us a lengthy and

complicated account of the animosities among the principal families in Florence

instigated by and involving male kin in blood feuds, the narrator wryly comments:

Fabritio, being much concerned for his kinsman, vowed revenge (according to the

ancient and laudable custom of Italy) upon Lorenzo if he survived, or in case of his

death... upon his next of kin, and so to descend lineally, like an English estate, to all

the heirs males of his family (489).

20 By being compared with family feud, English primogeniture emerges as an equally

tyrannical practice, but so does forced marriage. As Incognita says, resistance to her

father’s interests in alliance would mean that she would “be baited by my father,

brother and other relations” (514), while Aurelian proclaims the freedom of choice as

his inalienable right in a declamatory speech: “O ye unequal powers... give us a will to

choose, then curb us with a duty to restrain that choice? Cruel father... am I to be the

sacrifice to expiate your offences past—past ere I was born?... But, O, my soul is free;

you have no title to my immortal being” (507)20.


18

21 Murderous confrontations among members of different aristocratic families not only

construct hierarchical order but are also constitutive of notions of male honor that

necessarily include physical violence. But because this system of political ascendancy is

shown to have reached an impasse that threatens its physical reproduction, “the happy

reconciliation of two noble families” (500) through alliance emerges as the only

solution. The conservatism of Congreve’s plot lies “in the advocacy of an increasingly

antiquated method of maintaining family unit – the personal authority of the father –

against not only the ancient blood feud but also the modern solution, the device of the

strict settlement...”21 “The personal authority of the father” is restored and, moreover,

reinforced by the tautology between love and duty that provides a mythical resolution

to a real crisis in aristocratic ideological hegemony. Congreve describes the problem

but also parodies its resolution by altering the romance convention of “discovered

parentage”. Although the author undercuts the generic associations of the convention,

since the two lovers’ parentage was “discovered” only at the end but was known or

guessed by the reader all along, he nonetheless retains its ideological function, namely,

the restabilization of hereditary descent through the restoration of name.

22 In Incognita, the alteration of names, and their vicissitudes, coincides with the game of

delayed identities. During that game, name serves as a mere coin in the exchange of

deceptive signs. This is thrown into relief by the fact that signatures on paper, that

normally function as formal declaration of identity, here simply reconfirm illusionary

identity. The fact that from Incognita’s torn letter the only intact piece ironically bears

her pseudonym (a non-name), inscribes a semiotic instability in the character’s

“personality”. According to Ronald Barthes, “the proper name acts as a magnetic field

for the semes” i.e. those units of the signifier that combine to make up a character22.

Here, however, the recurrent identical semes that normally construct character giving

it a relative stability are shared by different characters. Insofar as signifiers of

character are identical and common to more than one hero they neutralize the

discriminating function of proper name and erase it as a synonym of individuality.

Thus, the restoration of a hero’s proper name, which to the novelistic regime is “an

instrument of exchange... [that] allows the substitution of a nominal unit for a

collection of characteristics”23 is void here. Because the “collection of characteristics”

that make up character is uniform to Aurelian and Hippolito, and exactly the same in

Incognita and Juliana, the revelation or addition of the proper name alters nothing. In

this sense, the unveiling of “the fair Incognita, differing nothing from Juliana but in her

name” (525) is paradigmatic of the novella’s indifference to name as a sign of

individuality24.

23 However, name is crucial precisely because it does not mark individuality but social

positioning. Therefore its recovery turns into urgency for the patrilineal order, which

cannot afford the game of substituted identities ad infinitum. Hippolito in the guise of

Leonora’s cousin, Lorenzo, runs the risk of becoming the object of Don Fabritio’s

(Juliana’s brother’s) revenge thus being unwittingly implicated in a vendetta. His

signing as Aurelian potentially threatens the system of alliances that govern Florence

because Aurelian and Leonora are an odd coupling in the same way that his falling in

love with his “cousin” may cause further complications in Leonora’s family. Family

structures are vulnerable to arbitrary naming that registers language as a simple

convention making sense only in terms of an erotic game. While distancing himself

from language as a register of a continuity of the social with the moral or cosmic order,


19

Congreve draws attention to the implications of linguistic arbitrariness25. This

threatens to dissolve not only family structures, which need to be improved rather

than destroyed, but also the system of privilege and dependencies constructed by them;

moreover, this system designates “individuality” as a corollary of position within it.

Therefore, the recovery of name is tantamount to the recovery of title in the political

hierarchy outside which Aurelian cannot simply be.

24 The reinstatement of social identity is effected through chance that serves as the

engine of the narrative. Chance emerges in the form of the “many probable casualties”

which, as Congreve states in his preface, “intervene in opposition to the main design,

viz. of marrying two couples so oddly engaged in an intricate amour” (475). At the same

time, chance, as timely intervention, is precisely that force that brings about the happy

ending. The point is that, far from being a mere structural principle of “the unity of

contrivance” (which the author aspires to), chance is an integral part of the system of

misrecognitions that the novella sustains. It is by chance that Hippolito mistook

Aurelian for an enemy and attacked him with his sword. He could have killed him had

not “the extraordinary care of providence” directed his sword in such a way that it

gave him a little bruise with the hilt. Hippolito, shattered by his realization that he had

almost committed “the most execrable act of amicide,” blames himself for “his

blindness in not knowing his dearest friend” (495).

25 This incident exemplifies the operations of chance in Incognita as a whole. It describes

the heroes’ mistakes but at the same time it is that very same element that rescues

them from their mistakes. This association of chance with human agency, however

flawed, prevents the heroes from turning into merely physical recipients of an action

that simply happens to them since it does not originate in them. Congreve’s characters

are not simple pawns in the game of fate insofar as that game may at times supersede

their agency but it is partly instigated by them. So, the relationship of characters and

chance differs from that which, as Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, typifies Greek adventure-

time which wherever “appears in the subsequent development of the European novel,

initiative is handled over to chance26”. In Incognita, while chance is the structural

principle of the narrative it is deprived of “all initiative and power” for another crucial

reason too: In contrast with the Greek romance that Bakhtin analyzes, space here is

both specific and concrete; as such it curtails chance, “for any concretization—

geographic, economic, sociopolitical, quotidian-- would fetter the freedom and

flexibility of adventures and limit the absolute power of chance27”. It is precisely the

concretization of space in all the above respects, however sketchy, that, in the last

analysis, allows chance to serve the wider ideological concerns that Incognita inscribes.

Chance rescues Aurelian from the unhappiness of an arranged marriage since, as it

turns out, the veiled Incognita is Juliana “differing nothing... but in her name” (525).

This “but” is doubly significant: On the one hand, it is a gesture that throws into relief

that chance after all has proved itself decorous, therefore there was never opposition

between duty and love in the first place. On the other, however, it refers to Juliana’s

name, which, though ironically underplayed, does indeed make the difference. Chance

has effectively worked towards the stabilization and reassertion of aristocratic alliance

and the continuation of inherited privilege, as the closing paragraph indicates: “They

all thought it proper to attend upon the great Duke... and to acquaint him with the

novelty of what had passed” (525). As is “proper,” the state sanctions private choice

and family politics. Congreve uses chance to effect the “happy resolution” of a conflict,

which proves to be an essentially state concern, in a gesture that exposes the


20

inadequacies of aristocratic ideology which he critiques but also salvages from any

serious threat. After all, miraculous resolutions are as ideologically effective as “real”

ones.

NOTES

1. . For formalist readings which also raise the issue of the genre to which Incognita belongs, see

Irene Simon, “Early Theories of Prose Fiction: Congreve and Fielding,” in Imagined Worlds, ed.

Maynard Mack (Methuen:London, 1968) 19-35. Simon stresses Congreve’s indebtedness to French

classical theory and notes that in Incognita he gave “a more graceful form to the nouvelle” (19). In

“Congreve’s ‘Incognita’ and the Art of the Novella,” Criticism 11(1969): 329-42, Maximillian E.

Novak also argues that “Congreve was not writing a ‘novel’ in our sense of the word. He was

writing what the Augustans called a ‘novel,’ and which we, for want of a better term would call a

novella” (330); Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558-1700 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985) Chapter 17,

esp. 333. Also see Helga Drougge, The Significance of Congreve’s “Incognita” (Uppsala: Acta

Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1976); and Brian Corman, “Congreve, Fielding, and the Rise of Some

Novels,” in British Theater and Other Arts 1660-1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington, DC:

Folger Books, 1984) 257-70.

2. Salzman 337.

3. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987)

63.

4. “The ‘personal merit’ of the protagonists in resisting aristocratic tyranny evaporates in this

effulgence of ignorance, along with the illusion that there ever was a problem of status

inconsistency for the constant lovers to overcome.” McKeon 265.

5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, unidentified collective

translation (1966; London: Routledge, 2000) Chapters 2 and 3. As Foucault argues, from the

seventeenth century the constitution of signs was increasingly perceived as binary (in terms of

the link between the significant and the signified), and to the question of how a sign is related to

what it signifies the answer is sought in the analysis of representation during the Classical age

(42-43).

6. William Congreve, “Incognita,”in An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman

(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 481-82. All further references will be to this edition and appear

parenthetically in the text. Incognita draws a distinction here between wit and “humour” or

“constitution of the person.” In “On Humour in Comedy: A Letter to John Dennis” (in Sources of

Dramatic Theory: Plato to Congreve, ed. Michael J. Sidnell, vol. 1 [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991]),

Congreve defines humour as “from nature,” that “shows us as we are” because it “has relation to

us, and to what proceeds from us.” He distinguishes it from “habit” (in the sense of dress but also

of the peculiarities of behavior, manners and speech, common to most of people of the same

country), which is “contracted by use or custom” (300-02). I suggest that the above distinction

between humor and wit lies in Congreve’s homology between wit as a culturally acquired code

and dress as “contracted by custom.” Both are cultural constructs and therefore equally unstable

indications of “nature”. Novak points out that, in the novel, “wit itself is but another form of

disguise, a mask” (336) but he omits Incognita’s lines on humor (336-37). In contrast with his

comedies, Congreve does not problematize wit here. This partly pertains to the technical point


21

that there are not many dialogues in his novel. Obviously the unity of action, characteristic of

comedy, that he seeks to reproduce here as “an unity of contrivance” (“Preface to the Reader”

475) is not predicated on dialogue. See, for example, Corman, who remarks that the narrator of

Incognita is far wittier than any of the other characters' (265).

7. For conjecturing in terms of probable signs, see Douglas Lane Patey, Probability and Literary

Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984)

35-50. Foucault notes that from the seventeenth century onward the signs are perceived in terms

of certainty and probability: “there can be no sign until there exists a known possibility of

substitution between two known elements (59). Therefore the signifying function is constituted

by knowledge and ceases to simply inhere in the very things that the signs indicate.

8. That, by being associated with romantic “transport,” the face of the beloved perpetuates

illusion is also clear in Hippolito’s resolve not to reveal his true identity to Leonora once “she

pulled off her mask and discover... the most angelic face he had ever beheld” (485).

9. Robert Markley, Two Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley and

Congreve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Chapter 6. As Markley argues, a play such as, for

example, Love for Love harps on male fixations on female unknowability and on staple

characterizations. However, here this mystification is intensely synecdochic and, as such, it

acquires a fetishistic dimension. Women appear in token like Incognita’s white hand, that

triggers Aurelian’s desire, or Leonora’s handkerchief placed on Hippolito’s helm, and as

fragmented signs, like Incognita’s name on the torn piece of her letter. That the signature has

been preserved as a pseudonym maintains female mystery, which is reinforced by female

wearing of masks and veils.

10. “This opportunity of persuading man to disobedience, determined the matter in favour of

Aurelian more than all his excellencies and qualifications, take him as Aurelian, or Hippolito, or

both together” (500).

11. For the understanding of character on the basis of its signs as these are categorized according

to general patterns, that is, decorums (i.e. age, sex, profession, rank etc.), see Patey 100-01.

12. The narrator’s comment on the two friends’ appearance, “different from other people and,

indeed, differing from one another” (480), appears odd if not seen as ironically undercutting this

very statement of difference.

13. Jina Politi, “Fall and Redemption of Language in the 17th Century”, Yearbook of English Studies,

vol. 18 (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1980) 276-77.

14. William B. Warner, “The Elevation of the Novel in England: Hegemony and Literary History,”

in The English Novel: 1700 to Fielding, ed. Richard Kroll, vol. 1(Longman: London and New York,

1998) 60-61.

15. “At the core of aristocratic ideology is the conviction that a stable social order is a

dependable guide to the greater moral order, and in a patrilineal culture based upon degrees of

status, social order is a function of genealogy. More succinctly, birth is a sign of worth”. (McKeon

214).

16. Foucault 19.

17. The narrator inscribes Hippolito’s “quality” and ancestry as the first mark of resemblance

followed by “conformity of temper and equality in years” (476).

18. Foucault 51; for the faculty of discrimination, see 55-56.

19. . Salzman 328. It is obvious that I disagree with Novak’s remark that “Incognita might just as

well have taken place in London or Paris without the slightest change in the carefully plotted

action” (341-42). In Restoration drama a stock Italy (or Spain) is used as the setting in a number

of plays, and often serves asa means by which the dramatists reinforce their progressive critique

of the rigorous patriarchal practices that these countries supposedly exemplify; in reality this

critique is directed against their contemporary English reality


22

20. The theme of forced marriage as a barbarous practice is at the core of Restoration comedy,

especially in its early phase. So here Congreve treads on familiar grounds. Aurelian’s discourse of

the right to self-determination in the face of paternal tyranny resonates in Valentine’s

confrontation of his father in Love for Love (1695).

21. McKeon 265.

22. Ronald Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (1990; Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 67.

23. Barthes 94-95

24. . Neither does the final restoration of Incognita’s name affect our retrospective perception of

past events in the light of a new understanding. Congreve’s narrative is clearly not what Lennard

J. Davis calls “teleogenic” in the sense that its closure affords a revision of past events from the

viewpoint of subsequent ones. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987)

208-13.

25. . In “Naming and Entitlement in Wycherley, Etherege, and Dryden,” Comparative Drama 21

(1988): 259-89, Derek Hughes argues that Wycherley, Etherege, and Dryden no longer subscribe

by the view that language is a register of moral order that expresses an analogy between

individual and cosmos. I believe that this also applies to Congreve although, as Markley suggests,

his comedies attempt the reconciliation of wit and morality in a way that preserves language as a

register of the characters’ moral nature (195-250).

26. . M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a

Historical Poetics”, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holkquist,

trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Texas UP, 19992) 95. In this essay, Bakhtin

speaks of “adventure-time” in the Greek romances written between the second and sixth

centuries A. D., which survives as late as Walter Scott. He argues that chance is the controlling

element in the “time segments” that constitute this “adventure-time,” in the context of which

the heroes act “as merely physical persons” since chance deprives them of initiative (91-95).

27. . Bakhtin 100. Bakhtin argues that the interchangeability of time in the Greek romance

signifies a temporal order in which historical time is erased (84-110).

ABSTRACTS

Le présent article étudie la propension à l’erreur qu’affichent les personnages de la longue

nouvelle de William Congreve, Incognita (1692). Leur mauvaise perception des signes, qu’ils

interprètent en termes de vraisemblance, amène les personnages de Congreve à suivre un

chemin fait d’erreurs qui conduit à une crise. Cultivé dans le terrain de vraisemblance, le

malentendu se développe surtout autour de ces signes qui relèvent de l’idéologie aristocratique.

Alors que les pratiques traditionnelles de l’aristocratie sont présentées comme dépassées, voire

obsolètes, Congreve les remet au goût du jour par le truchement du hasard qui “fait bien les

choses”. Aussi privilégie-t-il les valeurs chevaleresques et fait l’apologie des intérêts patriarcaux.

En effet, lorsque les véritables identités des héros sont rétablies, le hasard aura bien servi les

exigences du rang social de chacun. Le conflit initial entre le libre choix d’un partenaire et

l’intérêt patriarcal pour les aspects sociaux du mariage se voit totalement dépourvu de

fondement à la fin de la nouvelle. Conserver son rang social est l’enjeu politique déterminant

dans cette nouvelle où, en dépit des apparences, Congreve redore le blason de l’alliance

aristocratique.


23

AUTHORS

ASPASIA VELISSARIOU

Dr Aspasia Velissariou is Associate Professor of English Literature, Faculty of English Studies,

University of Athens, Greece. Her publications include articles on Samuel Beckett in the Journal of

Beckett Studies and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, on John Millington Synge in Modern

Drama, on William Wycherleyin Restoration and Texas Studies in Literatureand Language, on Aphra

Behn in PLL and Richard Brinsley Sheridan in Bulletin de la société d’études Anglo-Américaines des

XVIIe et XVIIe siècles. Her most recent work is entitled Female Sexual Transgression in Jacobean

Tragedy (Presses Universitaires d’Athènes, 2002).


24

Sleepwalking into the NineteenthCentury: Charles Brockden Brown’s“Somnambulism”

Michael Cody

1 Like his novels Wieland and Edgar Huntly, Charles Brockden Brown’s fragment of fiction

called “Somnambulism”1 is set on the American frontier between civilization and the

wilderness2. And as is the case with the novels, the fragment’s setting and action

reaffirm Brown’s ability to use this frontier as a space for exploring ideas about an

American life in transition. Within this setting, Brown utilizes some rather typical

Gothic conventions—darkness of night, a young woman in danger, an unknown

presence, and the like—to tell the story of a tragic murder and the search for

information that hopefully will lead to the author of the crime. The narrator of the

story, Richard Althorpe, lives his waking life in a world governed by neoclassical

decorum, by reason, restraint, and order, the civic virtues promoted by the Federalist

agenda of his time. Within this social and political context he struggles—often

unsuccessfully—to manage his romantic spirit: “My imagination was vivid. My

passions, when I allowed them sway, were uncontroulable. My conduct, as my feelings,

was characterised by precipitation and headlong energy” (3: 337).3 Thus in

“Somnambulism”, Brown applies the “intellectual forcefulness” Berthoff identifies in

his fiction (46) to the exploration of ideas forming at the point of tension between a

fading eighteenth-century rationalism and a nascent nineteenth-century non-rational

individualism.

2 Brown’s editorial headnote—largely an apparent extract from the 14 June 1784 issue of

the Vienna Gazette—provides what seems to be a key to understanding the fragment.

The clipping reports the arrest of a male somnambulist for the murder of a young

woman who “was the object of his affection’” and on a “journey... which... had given

him the utmost anxiety for her safety’”. The young man commits the murder “while

asleep, ... entirely unknown to himself’” (3: 335)4. In “Somnambulism”, Brown explores

in fiction the situation presented in the report as fact, giving emotional and

psychological drama to the story of a distraught lover and sleepwalker5. Between the


25

elliptical dashes with which the story begins and ends, with which Brown indicates that

more of the story exists beyond the confines of the printed text of the fragment,

Althorpe never discovers—except vaguely in a prophetic dream—who murdered

Constantia Davis. Although alternative interpretations exist, readers generally

understand that Althorpe is the story's sleepwalker and that he himself murdered her6.

3 Mr. Davis and his daughter Constantia are visiting a friend—Althorpe’s uncle, with

whom the young man lives—in the sparsely populated countryside of Pennsylvania.

One particular evening, just as the Davises are about to retire from the hearth and

prepare for bed, a messenger arrives with an urgent missive for Mr. Davis, who decides

to set out immediately in order to return to his own home as soon as possible. Althorpe

—in love with Constantia in spite of her being engaged to another and desperate not to

lose what he considers his only opportunity to win her for himself—protests against

their departure along a dark road and through a countryside unfamiliar to them. But

Mr. Davis and Constantia see no logical reason that they should not make the night

journey the father’s business seems to demand. They have with them a guide, and they

feel the various dangers of the American road pose no threat to them as long as they

remain alert and cautious. But Althorpe's fears push him “to enumerate and magnify

the possibilities” of danger, and his “emotions arose to terror”. “The strength of a

belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation”, he says in a rational observation

on such irrational trains of thought, “seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for

credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the

insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it,

we become more forcibly attached to it”. His sense of himself as a romantic hero—one

who feels he knows the country road almost as well as his own “chamber floor”—leads

him into a social blunder: “I made bold enquiries into the importance of the motives

that should induce them to expose themselves to the least hazard”. Thus he crosses the

line of “scrupulous decorum” and deference, and his uncle’s guests become suspicious

of his motives (3: 337). Althorpe can find no rational grounds for his heightened

emotions. The others see his imagination as misleading him into envisioning dangers

that exist only in his own irrationality, an irrationality which Miss Davis will privately

attribute to the young man’s believing that he is in love (3: 341).

4 But the tension between the romantic and the neoclassical arises not only between

Althorpe and the Davises but also within Althorpe as an individual. Once the father and

daughter are resolved to leave with no assistance other than that of their hired guide,

the intense struggle between imagination and reason moves to the interior of

Althorpe’s mind. Faced with reasonable arguments against his fears and forebodings,

conscious also of a duty to be obedient to his uncle (who believes with the Davises that

there is no real danger in their journey), Althorpe finds himself left with no choice but

to relent and attempts to restore to his character and actions some sense of self-

restraint and rational order. But he exhibits these neoclassical, republican virtues only

while the outside community exerts pressure on him to do so. “As long as their

representations rung in my ears”, he says, “I allowed myself to be ashamed of my

weakness, and conjured up a temporary persuasion that my attendance was, indeed,

superfluous, and that I should show most wisdom in suffering them to depart alone”

(3: 338). As this largely self-aware young man recognizes, however, his dutiful restraint

of individual desires and humble submission to the will of his superiors—virtuous

actions in a republican citizen—are only a “temporary persuasion”, a “conjured”

illusion. As soon as the communal influences of reason and social order are removed by


26

the departure of the Davises and his uncle’s retiring for the night, Althorpe’s internal

struggle resumes, and he finds himself “breathless with fear of some unknown and

terrible disaster that awaited” father and daughter on the dark road (3: 338-39).

5 At this point, the upcoming somnambulistic event begins to take form, and soon

Althorpe himself—an individual released from the restraints of republican society,

released in this case by sleep—will become that “unknown” which he fears. “A hundred

times I resolved to disregard their remonstrances”, he says, “and hover near them till

the morning”. And as many times, he decides against this idea. At last, however, still

wrestling with these alternating resolutions, he closes the gate and haltingly returns to

his uncle's house. There he spends “a drooping and melancholy evening” during which

his “imagination”, he claims, “continually hovered over our departed guests”. Memory

and “fancy” blend as he remembers his brief time with Miss Davis, and in an excess of

sensibility, his “eyes overflowed with tears”; “There insensibly arose a sort of

persuasion”, he concludes, “that destiny had irreversably decreed that I should never

see her more”.Sleep finally overtakes him, however, and he “sinks into a profound

slumber” (3: 339).

6 In the dream which naturally follows the ideas and desires that consumed his conscious

mind, a dream in which he is unable to save Constantia but then tracks down and

assassinates her assassin, Althorpe finds his thoughts “full of confusion and

inaccuracy” (3: 340). This confused state reflects early psychology’s understanding of

dreams. As Allan Gardner Smith has shown, Brown—in Wieland and Edgar Huntly—made

use of contemporary scientific ideas about sleep and dreams, especially as these ideas

appear in Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia. That Althorpe’s dream is as typically confusing

and inaccurate as most dreams are results from what Smith terms the “lack of

volition”. “Normally”, Smith writes in describing Darwin’s theories,

the mind follows trains of association which are quite well established and

incorporate some acts of volition within them, as we compare our passing trains of

thought with our acquired knowledge of nature. But in sleep the lack of volition

causes these habitual connections to be dissevered, and to fall into new

“catenations”. Therefore dreams display the kind of inconsequence that Brown

describes so frequently, often in the form of nightmare. “Incubus”, as Darwin calls

it, is accounted for by a combination of uneasy sensations and profound sleep.

(12-13)7

7 Althorpe certainly experiences this “combination”, and even though in waking life he

finally exhibits self-control and does not follow Constantia and her father, in his

dreams—and in his somnambulism—he follows to disastrous effect. Not only does the

young man find himself unable to save his love in the dream (while killing her in

reality), but he also appears unable to adhere to either civil law or to a code of honor

when in his nightmare he discovers her assailant; instead of acting in accordance with

the waking “train of thought” that should, in a man of honor, demand the criminal

either be brought to justice or faced in a fair fight, he murders the murderer in a fit of

passion. As Althorpe himself puts it, “I did not employ the usual preliminaries which

honour prescribes, but, stimulated by rage, attacked him with a pistol, and terminated

his career by a mortal wound” (3: 340).

8 Having experienced this cathartic dream, having committed as well the unconscious

and perhaps in some way cathartic action of assuring that Constantia will never belong

to another, Althorpe—“quietly reposing in the chair in which I had fallen asleep”—


27

awakes the next morning “refreshed and invigorated” and with a lighter heart goes

about his daily chores until news comes of the tragic attack on Constantia.

9 Upon his arrival at the home of Dr. Inglefield, as Alfred Weber says, Althorpe, “the

former first-person narrator, steps into the background and gives an objective,

detailed, and graphic account of the nocturnal events, in which the father and daughter

become the protagonists” (“Beginnings” 14). The remainder of the story is theirs.

10 Having no concrete reason to fear anything along their way, and being as well on an

errand of apparently important business, they set out on the dark American road that

passes Althorpe's uncle's gate. “After they had parted from us”, Althorpe says, spinning

a narrative from the later accounts of Mr. Davis and the guide,

they proceeded on their way for some time without molestation. The clouds

disappearing, the star-light enabled them with less difficulty to discern their path.

They met not a human being till they came within less than three miles of the oak

which I have before described. Here Miss Davis looked forward with some curiosity

and said to her father, “Do you not see some one in the road before us? I saw him

this moment move across from the fence on the right hand and stand still in the

middle of the road”.

“I see nothing, I must confess”, said the father...

The carriage slowly advancing, and the form remaining in the same spot, Mr. Davis

at length perceived it, but was not allowed a clearer examination, for the person,

having, as it seemed, ascertained the nature of the cavalcade, shot across the road,

and disappeared. The behaviour of this unknown person furnished the travellers

with a topic of abundant speculation.

... At length Mr. Davis said, “A thought has just occurred to me. The person whom

we just now saw is young Althorpe”.

Miss Davis was startled: “Why, my dear father, should you think so? It is too dark to

judge, at this distance, by resemblance of figure...” (3: 340-41)

11 For the next while, father and daughter grow increasingly uneasy. The mysterious

figure comes and goes; “As I live’, exclaimed Mr. Davis, ’that thing, whatever it be,

haunts us. I do not like it. This is strange conduct for young Althorpe to adopt”. Like

Hawthorne’s Goodman Brown on the dusky forest path, the Davises are unable to see

anything distinctly either in the road ahead of them or alongside it. But whereas the

young Puritan’s inability to see shakes his “faith” in his education and in the Christian

leaders of Salem Village, the Davises’ inability to see shakes their rational certainty of

control over their environment, their reasonable expectation of safety, and the

strength of purpose with which they had set out on their journey. As the pair and their

guide approach the point where the road disappears into a stand of forest, Mr. Davis

seems more fearful and uncertain than Constantia: “’I know not how it is’, said he, ’but I

begin to be affected with the fears of young Althorpe. I am half resolved not to enter

this wood’” (3: 342).

12 Just then the Davises hear “a noise, at a small distance behind them, as of shutting a

gate” (3: 342). They call out, and a Yankee farmer “approached the chaise, and enquired

who they were, whence they came, whither they were going, and, lastly, what they

wanted” (3: 342-43)8. From him they learn that the figure shadowing them is probably

that of a local character named Nick Handyside—“’a fellow that went about the country

a’ nights. A shocking fool to be sure, that loved to plague and frighten people’”. “’Nick

is an odd soul to be sure; but he don’t do nobody no harm, as ever I heard, except by

scaring them’”, the farmer assures the Davises. “’He is easily skeart though, for that

matter, himself. He loves to frighten folks, but he’s shocking apt to be frightened


28

himself. I reckon you took Nick for a ghost. That’s a shocking good story, I declare. Yet

it’s happened hundreds and hundreds of times, I guess, and more’” (3: 343)9.

13 Furnished with this rational explanation of the mysterious figure in the night, Mr.

Davis and Constantia resume their journey somewhat more at ease, even developing a

lively curiosity—perhaps typical of “enlightened” individuals with an empirical

mindset—to see this strange native of the frontier and hear his screams. They hear

“rustling leaves or stumbling footsteps”, but the ghostly human only “occasionally

hovered in their sight” and never approaches to perform for them (3: 344).

14 Almost as soon as Althorpe's narrative provides an apparently reasonable solution to

the mystery, it begins to question that solution. Brown's use of language supplies a first

hint that the figure in the night is indeed Althorpe and not Handyside. That whoever

haunts the Davises sometimes “hovered” where he might be seen echoes Althorpe's

earlier internal struggles: “A hundred times I resolved to disregard their

remonstrances, and hover near them till the morning”; “My imagination continually

hovered over our departed guests” (3: 339). Moreover, the man who haunts the road

does not behave according to Handyside's reputation. The idiot trickster, Althorpe says,

“took pleasure in the effects which the sight of his own deformity produced, and

betokened his satisfaction by a laugh, which might have served as a model to the poet

who has depicted the ghastly risibilities of Death”. Apparently satisfied with the

Yankee farmer’s explanation of the mystery, however, Mr. Davis and Constantia, along

with Althorpe in his role in this section as third-person narrator, seem not to notice

that their shadow exhibits an ominously different behavior:

On this occasion... the monster behaved with unusual moderation. He never came

near enough for his peculiarities to be distinguished by star-light. There was

nothing fantastic in his motions, nor any thing surprising, but the celerity of his

transitions. They were unaccompanied by those howls, which reminded you at one

time of a troop of hungry wolves, and had, at another, something in them

inexpressibly wild and melancholy.

15 When the carriage arrives at the edge of the wood and Mr. and Miss Davis alight to

walk, “the spectre, which, till now, had been occasionally visible, entirely disappeared”

in direct contradiction to the manner in which Handyside was supposed to behave (3:

344).

16 In the darkness beneath the trees of this frontier wilderness, where, metaphorically,

reason and rational order are on tenuous ground, father and daughter talk about

Handyside, who is “no longer an object of terror”; Constantia “declared she should be

highly pleased by hearing his outcries, and consoled herself with the belief, that he

would not allow them to pass the limits which he had prescribed to his wanderings,

without greeting them with a strain or two”. Althorpe the sleepwalker stands hidden

nearby, “at less than twenty paces from them”, and he utters a “scream, dismally loud,

and piercingly shrill”, startling both the Davises and their horse (3: 345)10. The effect of

the scream is to separate father and daughter. Mr. Davis foolishly goes after the bolted

horse, leaving Constantia—at the story’s climax—unprotected against the lovelorn,

sleepwalking, and tragically armed Althorpe.

17 What cultural work might “Somnambulism” have performed for readers of the Literary

Magazine in 1805? Discussing in Sensational Designs Brown's Wieland, a story similarly set

on the American frontier and similarly peopled with supposedly rational characters,

Jane Tompkins says that “Wieland’s rural decencies are the seedbed of a holocaust.


29

Dramatizing the precariousness of Crèvecoeur’s ’perfect’ society, the novel’s plot offers

a direct refutation of the Republican faith in men’s capacity to govern themselves

without the supports and constraints of an established order” (49)11. Similarly,

Christopher Looby writes that Brown promotes in Wieland“a politics that recognizes the

necessity of a respect for traditional authority as the only bulwark against the

uncertainties and distortions that can afflict reasoned discourse” in a revolutionary

society, that in the novel Brown’s “persuasions, dramatized and allegorized, reveal him

to be a complex counter-revolutionary writer” (202). While in part true, these readings

fail to recognize that Brown’s novel also provides, at the same time, a “direct

refutation” of traditional, Federalist assumptions that “an established social order” was

indeed possible. Thus Wieland, this “American Tale” of “Transformation”12, shows that,

in the new nation's increasingly liberal society, faith in either rational order or social

balance was just as precarious as the rising liberal individualism Brown himself

promoted to a large extent in the Literary Magazine. Brown was no “party-man” (2: 446);

Wieland critiques the agendas of both the Federalists’ classical republicanism and the

French Revolution’s radical democracy. The same exploration or testing of ideas, I

argue, takes place in “Somnambulism”.

18 As Tompkins and Looby suggest, Brown’s story attacks the ideas of radical democracy,

exemplified by the chaos of the French Revolution. In his somnambulistic state,

Althorpe is disconnected from all restraints, excepting physical limitations. The

sleepwalker, like the revolutionaries in France, acts unconsciously, without reference

to the authority of the conscious individual's natural aristocracy—the reason, moral

values, character, education, manners, and so on that prohibit an individual’s acting

from pure selfishness and licentiousness. Nick Handyside is obviously irrational, a

social outcast, and one of the unknowns Mr. Davis and Constantia potentially face on

the frontier, but his freaks are easily detected and easily stopped; the Yankee farmer

explains the madman’s behavior and tells the Davises that a stern, authoritative voice

will serve to frighten him away. On the other hand, Althorpe, when conscious, seems a

known quantity—if sometimes a contrary one—in society as it is represented by Mr.

Davis, Constantia, and his uncle. When separated from the restraint that society places

on him, however, especially when his id is separated by sleep from the control of his

ego, he becomes a far more dangerous unknown than Handyside. Had the Davises been

able to see Althorpe clearly as he shadowed them, outwardly he would have seemed a

recognizable, knowable, and probably a welcome member of the community, but

inwardly he is a nightmare, like France during the Terror, of licentious freedom and

irrational, radical democracy.

19 “Somnambulism” not only suggests the dangers of democracy but also the inability of

Federalist ideology to counterbalance these dangers. Popular fiction in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries supplied example after example of

individuals who go against Federalism’s rational, moral agenda and pay dearly for their

transgressions. Given the popularity of Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Foster’s The

Coquette, given as well the proliferation of sentimental, moralistic fictions in magazines

available in America at the time, Brown’s readers must have been at least

subconsciously aware of Federalist assumptions that life should be organized and

coherent and that, in order to achieve such organization and coherence, citizens should

behave morally and virtuously, subordinating their private desires to the public good.


30

20 Brown’s “Somnambulism” attacks these assumptions. All of settled America was, to

some degree, a frontier, a space between the established civilization and order of the

Old World and the young American nation’s own primitive hinterland, the wilderness

to the west. Understood in this context, life in the new nation was as yet uncertain,

unpredictable, even dangerous. Brown suggests that neither rationalism nor republican

civic virtue serves to protect the individual from the threat of physical and

psychological unknowns. Mr. Davis and Constantia assure themselves and young

Althorpe that the night journey holds no dangers, but their assurances are based on the

known—darkness itself cannot hurt them, sloughs can be avoided, other impediments

such as rocks and trees in the roadway are to be watched for, and so on. Even when the

figure in the night begins to seem threatening to Mr. Davis, Constantia calmly defers to

logic: “Nay, my father, ... be not disturbed. What danger can be dreaded by two persons

from one?” (3: 342). In a limited way, this makes rational sense, but the unknowns—the

abilities, character, and condition of this particular “spectre”, the unfamiliar road, the

dark woods—call her judgment into question13. Out in the world, Brown suggests,

rationalists such as the Davises deceive themselves into believing that life is ordered

according to reason and that aberrations such as the figure that haunts the road—be he

Nick Handyside or another “thing”—can be dealt with on rational terms14. Like the

Enlightenment itself, which Brown believed did not exist on as wide a scale as European

and American intellectual and political leaders claimed (4: 111-14), rational republican

order and balance do not necessarily dictate life on the frontier of liberal America.

21 Readers of Rowson and Foster, taking up “Somnambulism”, faced a dilemma for which

there was no rational solution. Constantia dies the same as Charlotte Temple and Eliza

Wharton, albeit more violently. But the story does not fit the Federalist model. What

moral code, Brown’s readers must have asked, has Constantia broken? She has neither

been seduced by novels nor been flirtatious and become pregnant. What crime against

convention has she committed? She naturally chooses to accompany her father on the

journey that leads to her death, but she could not have known she was making so fatal

a choice. What instruction does the reader receive from her tragic end?

22 Like Brown’s essay “Is a Free or Despotic Government Most Friendly to Human

Happiness?” (3: 178-81)—published in March 1805, only two months before the story of

Althorpe and Constantia appeared—“Somnambulism” suggests that elements moving

within a free society often collide, sometimes violently. The violence of the collisions in

this state of liberal individualism depends on the degree of the various physical,

psychological, or ideological difference between the colliding elements. Understood in

this context, “Somnambulism" represents an exploration of extreme oppositions: the

violent collision of a man in love with a woman who does not return his love, of the

incautiously rational and the uncontrollably irrational, a staunch Federalism and a

radical democracy, neoclassical reason and romantic imagination. Had Althorpe

remained “conscious”, the worst collision in the story would have been that moment of

argument over the night journey, when the democratic Althorpe displayed his inability

to be governed by decorum and a virtuous sense of deference. Both parties in the

conflict are ruled by self-interest, but dangerous violence erupts only when Mr. Davis

and Constantia naïvely assume the world to be rational, knowable, and Althorpe loses

consciousness—and with it his conscience—and becomes the unknowable in their path.

For Brown, this view of the world and of human relations, although extreme, seems to

have been more realistic—and more useful—than that of the sentimental, moralistic


31

fiction appearing in contemporary novels and magazines. His own moral in

“Somnambulism” suggests that to be educated and wide awake (conscious) provides an

individual—and a new nation—with safeguards against such tragic experiences as those

of Constantia Davis and Richard Althorpe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bennett, Charles E. “The Charles Brockden Brown Canon”. Diss. U of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill, 1974.

Berthoff, Warner B. “’A Lesson in Concealment’: Brockden Brown’s Method in Fiction”.

Philological Quarterly 37 (1958): 45-57.

Brown, Charles Brockden. The Literary Magazine, and American Register. 8 vols. Philadelphia: John

Conrad, 1803-1807.

Krause, Sydney J. “Historical Essay”. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. The Novels and

Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown. Ed. Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid. Bicentennial Ed. Vol.

4. Kent: Kent State UP, 1984. 295-400.

—. Introduction. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. 1984. Ed. Sydney J. Krause and S. W.

Reid. Kent: Kent State UP, 1987. vii-li.

Looby, Christopher. Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Scheick, William J. “Assassin in Artful Disguise: The De-Signed Designs of Charles Brockden

Brown’s ’Somnambulism ’”. Charles Brockden Brown. Ed. Marc Amfreville and Françoise Charras.

Profils Americains 11. Montpellier, Fr.: Presses de l'Imprimerie de l'Université Paul-Valéry—

Montpellier III, 1999. 27-45.

Smith, Allan Gardner. The Analysis of Motives: Early American Psychology and Fiction. Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 1980.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York:

Oxford UP, 1985.

Weber, Alfred. “The Beginnings of the American Short Story and Charles Brockden Brown”. Ts.

Unpublished essay, n.d.

—. ed. Somnambulism and Other Stories. By Charles Brockden Brown. Frankfurt am Main: Peter

Lang, 1987.

NOTES

1. . Although unpublished until Brown included it in the Literary Magazine for May 1805,

“Somnambulism” is generally believed to have been written several years earlier, between the

time in 1798 when Brown wrote the unpublished—and now lost—novel “Sky-Walk” and 1799

when Edgar Huntly appeared. The story has been identified by various scholars either as originally


32

part of the former novel or as a false start for the latter. See Bennett’s dissertation, “The Charles

Brockden Brown Canon” (208-10), Krause’s “Historical Essay” (332-36) and “Introduction” (XXII-

XXIII), and Weber’s “Bibliographical and Critical Notes” for his edition of Brown’s Somnambulism

and Other Stories (249-50).

2. . The narrator of “Somnambulism” identifies the setting as “Norwood” (3: 344), a place whose

name and description sound much like Norwalk, the landscape through which somnambulists

Clithero Edny and Edgar Huntly roam in Brown’s fourth novel. While both Norwood and Norwalk

appear to be similar frontier areas, the latter seems somewhat wilder and more rugged.

3. . All quotes from “Somnambulism" will be identified by the volume and page number of the

story's original publication in Brown’s The Literary Magazine, and American Register (1803-1807).

4. . The entire headnote reads as follows:

The following fragment will require no other preface or commentary than an extract from the Vienna

gazette of June 14, 1784. “At Great Glogau, in Silesia, the attention of physicians, and of the people, has been

excited by the case of a young man, whose behaviour indicates perfect health in all respects but one. He has

a habit of rising in his sleep, and performing a great many actions with as much order and exactness as

when awake. This habit for a long time showed itself in freaks and achievements merely innocent, or, at

least, only troublesome and inconvenient, till about six weeks ago. At that period a shocking event took

place about three leagues from the town, and in the neighbourhood where the youth's family resides. A

young lady, travelling with her father by night, was shot dead upon the road, by some person unknown. The

officers of justice took a good deal of pains to trace the author of the crime, and at length, by carefully

comparing circumstances, a suspicion was fixed upon this youth. After an accurate scrutiny, by the

tribunal of the circle, he has been declared the author of the murder: but what renders the case truly

extraordinary is, that there are good reasons for believing that the deed was perpetuated by the youth

while asleep, and was entirely unknown to himself. The young woman was the object of his affection, and

the journey in which she had engaged had given him the utmost anxiety for her safety”. (3: 335)

That Brown himself created this “extract” is possible. Scholars have been unable to locate this

story either in the Vienna Gazette or in any of the extant periodical literature from that time. No

one has been able to produce a copy of the article from among Brown’s papers, nor has anyone

been able to find for certain that the Gazette was even published in 1784 (Krause, “Historical”

334-35, n38).

5. . “Somnambulism” is one of Brown’s best works of short fiction, but it remains relatively

unexplored. To date, the most detailed analysis of the story is William J. Scheick’s essay “Assassin

in Artful Disguise: The De-Signed Designs of Charles Brockden Brown’s ’Somnambulism’“. Scheick

finds in “Somnambulism” the “perfect miniature of Charles Brockden Brown’s enigmatic literary

manner”, and over the course of his essay analyzes the fragment in terms of plot, moral stability,

structure, readership, authorship, and aesthetic design. He suggests that

[d]esign (as both intention and scheme) is effectively de-signed as the narrative signs of “Somnambulism”

lead to various culs de sac of self-referential configurations. Brown's chronicle, which adumbrates fin de

siècle Aestheticism, intimates that the mind is evidently ontologically bereft and epistemologically lost. It is

nonetheless capable of unwittingly inventing, rather than of consciously discovering, philosophical, moral,

political, and social signification—design as intention and pattern. (27)

The tendency of the few further mentions of the story in Brown scholarship has been to focus on

its obvious relationship to “Sky-Walk” and to Edgar Huntly. Still, Sydney Krause and Alfred Weber

have each laid a strong foundation upon which other interpretations of “Somnambulism” might

be built. In discussing the relationship between Althorpe’s conscious life and his sleepwalking,

Krause says that Brown begins “to show the tortured ego (technically the ’id’ in this case)

attempting to compensate for its practical defeat”—that is, Althorpe’s inability to convince

Constantia of the dangers of the night journey or of the reality of his love for her. The

unconscious somnambulistic event not only “release[s] the inner man” but also sets in motion an

unknown entity who “acts, often dangerously”. “Also implied is the response of the pleasure-


33

principle denied”, Krause continues, “the backlash of man’s raw emotional nature. And these

energies are not simply worked off passively in the wish-fulfillment of a dream” (“Historical”

335). Unfortunately these intriguing ideas are presented in the context of a discussion of Edgar

Huntly and are not deeply explored in relation to “Somnambulism” as a separate work.

Approaching the story from a different angle, analyzing how Brown and his short fiction

participate in the development of the American short story, Weber rightly identifies the tale as a

mixture of Gothic romance, psychological study, and crime fiction and ultimately claims that it is

“the first American detective story, published thirty-five years before Poe’s ’Murders in the Rue

Morgue’” (“Beginnings” 18, 12). I am indebted to Professor Weber for sending me the typescript

of his essay, “The Beginnings of the American Short Story and Charles Brockden Brown”, for my

use.

6. . For a lucid examination of the subject of somnambulism as it was understood in Brown’s day,

see Krause's “Historical Essay”, especially section V, 336-57. Krause’s discussion relates directly

to Edgar Huntly, but much of the factual information presented and some of the literary

interpretation suggested can be applied to “Somnambulism” as well.

As for the murder, William J. Scheick suggests three “feasible explanations”. The first suggestion

is that “Althorpe... murdered Constantia while he was dreaming and sleep-walking”. A second is

that Nick Handyside or some other unknown assailant shot her. The third possibility Scheick

suggests is that Althorpe “committed the murder on purpose”. This last is based on the idea that

Althorpe is indeed shadowing the Davises, that he overhears Constantia claim that she could

never be interested in the young man, and that, overhearing her disparaging words, Althorpe

thus has a motive for murder (31). My own interpretation remains the first of these possibilities,

that Althorpe murders Constantia while in his disturbed somnambulistic state.

7. . Brown had easy access to at least the first two volumes of Zoonomia at the time he was writing

“Somnambulism”. The first volume had been published in 1796 by New York printers T. & J.

Swords, who also printed Wieland and worked with Brown on the Monthly Magazine. In 1797 the

second volume issued from the press of Philadelphia’s Thomas Dobson. If Brown revised

“Somnambulism” before its appearance in the May 1805 number of the Literary Magazine, he

might also have seen all three parts of Darwin’s work as they were published by Boston’s Thomas

and Andrews in 1803. Brown was probably familiar as well with the writings about sleep by his

fellow Philadelphian Benjamin Rush, who suggests that “there are cases in which the change that

is produced in the state of the brain, by means of sleep, affects the moral faculty likewise: hence

we sometimes dream of doing and saying things, when asleep, which we shudder at, as soon as

we awake” (qtd. in Smith 12). Thus only in sleep can Althorpe escape his inhibitions and follow

the Davises in the night; his affected “moral faculty” might also have made it possible for him to

shoot Constantia at the foot of the giant oak.

8. . Although in the July 1804 number of the Literary Magazine Brown had disagreed with a foreign

writer's judgment that extreme inquisitiveness was a prominent feature of the American

character (2: 253), here in this Yankee farmer he creates just such an “inquisitive person”. The

character also represents one of Brown’s most direct—and successful—attempts to recreate a

provincial American personality and a colloquial American language:

As to what you seed in the road, continued [the farmer], I reckon it was nothing but a sheep or a cow. I am

not more scary than some folks, but I never goes out a’ nights without I sees some sich thing as that, that I

takes for a man or woman, and am scared a little oftentimes, but not much. I’m sure after to find that it’s

not nothing but a cow, or hog, or tree, or something. If it wasn’t some sich thing you seed, I reckon it was

Nick Handyside. (3: 343)

9. . At this point Althorpe interrupts the narrative to wonder why he or his uncle had not

thought to warn the Davises about Handyside, whose apparently harmless freaks were the only

unpredictable events to be wary of on the night journey. According to Althorpe’s description,

Handyside “was an idiot. He also merited the name of monster, if a projecting breast, a mis-


34

shapen head, features horrid and distorted, and a voice that resembled nothing that was ever

before heard, could entitle him to that appellation” (3: 343). Thus Handyside serves the plot by

suddenly becoming the prime suspect in Constantia’s murder. Moreover, in this unfortunate

individual, as Weber suggests, “The ghost motif of the 'Gothic romance’ has been transmuted into

a figure whose appearance and whose actions have the same horror effect, but who, in spite of

his ghost-like character, is given human traits” (“Beginnings” 15).

10. . Why does Althorpe scream? Perhaps, knowing the caprices of Nick Handyside, Althorpe

simply reacts to Constantia’s spoken desire to hear the harmless madman scream; her wish

either suggests to Althorpe that he is Handyside or prompts the somnambulistic young man so

hopelessly in love with her—so focused on her in the disconnected world of a dream—to attempt

to grant her request. Perhaps only the mere suggestion of screaming reached him where he

stood, and he responded, experiencing that “lack of volition”, as Smith calls it, which would have

restrained him while conscious. Perhaps, sleepwalking within the dream recounted earlier in the

story, Althorpe screams in the moment of uncontrollable “rage” that leads him to murder

Constantia’s assassin.

11. . In the context of Tompkins’s argument, the use of “Republican” here specifically refers to

Jeffersonian Republicanism.

12. . The full title of Wieland as it appears in Kent State’s Bicentennial Edition is Wieland; or The

Transformation. An American Tale.

13. . True, she is alone in the darkness when the sleepwalking Althorpe attacks, but I would

suggest that this situation is itself the result of her father’s and her separating, an irrational act,

which he too late attempts to correct by giving up the hopeless pursuit of the horse and

returning to his daughter.

14. . In discussing Romanticism in Brown’s Wieland and Edgar Huntly, Robert Hemenway says, “I

believe that Brown’s novels are ’Romantic’ because he creates dilemmas which are insoluble

through Neo-classical principles of coherence and rationality. Brown’s novels are Romantic

because he implies that irrationality is the governing force in human affairs, and that man's

efforts at ordering existence, his presumptions of an ability to reason, are self-delusive” (97).

“Somnambulism”, I argue, participates in this same type of Romanticism.

ABSTRACTS

Dans “Somnambulisme”, Charles Brockden Brown montre la tension qui se manifeste dans ce

début de l’histoire des Etats-Unis entre le républicanisme rationnel du XVIIIe siècle et

l’individualisme non-rationnel du XIXe lorsque le premier cède sa place au second.

D’une part, la nouvelle réprouve les positions rigides des Fédéraux; d’autre part, elle s’élève

contre le programme d’une démocratie trop laxiste. Autrement dit, elle explore l’opposition

entre extrêmes: amour et indifférence, rationnel et irrationnel, rigidité et laxisme, raison et

sentiment


35

AUTHORS

MICHAEL CODY

After writing his dissertation on Charles Brockden Brown’s work as editor of and chief

contributor to The Literary Magazine, and American Register (1803-1807), Michael Cody received his

doctorate from the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Professor Cody teaches in the

Department of English at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee.


36

Drawing-Room Naturalism in EdithWharton’s Early Short Stories

Scott Emmert

EDITOR'S NOTE

Traduit de l'anglais par Lucie Brault et Frédéric Levilly.

1 In her biography of Edith Wharton, Cynthia Griffin Wolff discusses the ways in which

the nineteenth-century upper-class girl was encouraged to deny her feelings,

particularly sexual ones. As a young girl of that class, Wharton was pressured into early

self-denial. One of the primary lessons Wharton learned was that “[s]ociety had

decreed that ‘nice’ young women didn’t really have feelings to be explained: if you did

have feelings–well, then, obviously you weren’t ‘nice.’ Lady-like behavior demanded

the total suppression of instinct.” As a reaction against her repressed upbringing,

young Edith Jones turned to books and to “making up” stories. Her “lifelong love of

words,” Wolff insists, “sprang from her early emotional impoverishment,” and nothing

terrified young Edith more than the prospect of remaining forever mute, which was

connected in her mind with the existence of “helpless” animals (Wolff 37, 27 and 25)1.

2 The notion of being seen and not heard was applied especially to female children of

Wharton’s class. Wolff summarizes Wharton’s training in proper gender roles with the

simple infinitive “to be.” Young women were meant to be looked at and admired, and

they were not expected “to do” much more than fulfill that ornamental role.

Independent action and opinion were not fostered in female children, and early on

Wharton learned to suppress her “impulse ‘to do’” (Wolff 42). Indeed, a portrait of

Wharton done when she was five years old displays her in a luxurious blue dress and

standing next to a vase of flowers; her long red hair drapes one shoulder, over which

the girl gives the viewer a coy look. The painting freezes the child in a purely

decorative posture2.

3 The need to present a proper appearance oppressed Wharton. Her first short story,

written when she was eleven, contains in its first paragraph the line: “‘Oh, how do you


37

do, Mrs. Brown?’ said Mrs. Tomkins. ‘If only I had known you were going to call I should

have tidied up the drawing room.’” When Edith’s mother, Lucretia, glanced at the story,

she returned it to her daughter with the acidic remark, “Drawing rooms are always

tidy” (Wharton Backward Glance, 73). Her words are borne out by an 1884 photograph of

the interior of Lucretia Jones’s house on West Twenty-Fifth Street, shown in the R. W.

B. Lewis biography of Wharton. The visible rooms are nothing if not rigidly ordered.

4 Wharton’s literary rebellion against the stifling nature of these rooms results in what

could be termed “drawing-room naturalism”. Repeatedly in her short fiction, female

characters are depicted in a variety of narrow spaces in which they suffer the

restrictions of social decorum. Wharton made an explicit connection between the

rooms of a large house and the psychology of upper-class women in “The Fulness of

Life” (1893) when the protagonist muses:

“I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of

rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the

drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where the

members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are

other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows

the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the

holy of holies, the soul sits alone”(14)3.

5 The deterministic element in Wharton’s fiction is social, and it is made concrete by her

presentation of spaces such as drawing rooms in which formal requirements impinge

upon a woman’s individual needs and desires.

6 A careful student of the literary marketplace, Wharton first began publishing fiction

during the development of literary naturalism in America. Although she eschewed the

usual subject matter of naturalist fiction, several of her early short stories, those

published around the turn of the nineteenth century, may be considered naturalistic

because they present characters who are aware of the social forces arrayed against

them, forces that prevent them from expressing original thoughts or becoming

autonomous selves. These characters may wish to be realist characters in possession of

an essential self, but they are pressured into living as naturalist characters subject to a

tyranny of appearance that grants them limited agency. While realist characters are

allowed a self-defining ability to act – permitted “to do” first in order “to be”

themselves – Wharton’s characters, especially her female characters, are often allowed

merely “to be” passive constructions of external forces4.

7 Although the scholarship on Wharton’s involvement in literary naturalism appears

mainly in connection with her novels, a common property in all of her fiction is the

dramatization of the inability to act or the insufficiency of action. That such a

dramatization is especially clear in her short stories results largely from the greater

sense of restriction the form allows. Wolff has identified Wharton’s frequent use of

“enclosed space” to suggest the limited options of her characters (60). But in addition

to depicting a variety of enclosures – rooms in houses and compartments on trains, for

example – Wharton’s short stories become restrictive spaces themselves. Andrew Levy

argues that Wharton took thematic advantage of the short story form, because

“[a]mong prose genres, it is most like an enclosed space, most concentrated in form.

Among all genres, it is most ‘locked,’ requiring the synthetic closure of an impact-filled

beginning and a dramatic conclusion” (65).

8 The connection between form and deterministic theme is often stronger in short

stories than it is in novels, and Wharton made effective use of this connection in her


38

short fiction. As Philip Fisher and June Howard have noted, naturalist novels are

frequently structured by plots of decline in which a character degenerates physically,

socially, and even morally over an extended period of time. Such a plot served most

obviously to give form to Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Frank Norris’s

Vandover and the Brute (1914) (Fisher 169-78; Howard 63-69). In addition to the plot of

decline, Fisher finds the structure of naturalist novels to be dependent upon different

“temporary worlds” through which characters carry their desires and seek their

identities (138-53). Short stories, in contrast, cannot easily form narrative with the plot

of decline or with a series of temporary worlds. Their length makes it nearly impossible

to present the span of time needed to make plausible a character’s gradual

degeneration, and at best a short story may focus successfully on a limited number of

settings. The short story form nonetheless provides advantages to naturalist writers. A

story’s limited length and formal compression allow for a keener dramatization of the

oppositional forces arrayed against naturalist characters. Often the sense of restriction

and entrapment felt by these characters is more dramatic and less ambiguous in short

stories than in novels. While critics (e.g., Richard A. Kaye and Lori Merish) often

identify certain of Edith Wharton’s early novels as only partially committed to literary

naturalism, in a number of her early short stories Wharton’s commitment to extending

naturalism to the social sphere is reflected by the unambiguous deterministic plight of

her characters, a plight that is apparent both formally and thematically.

9 Wharton embraced the short story form, eventually producing nine story collections;

furthermore, she admitted to struggling with the structural demands of the novel. She

wrote, in a letter to Robert Grant in 1907, that the need to view a novel “more

architectonically” required her to “sacrifice... the small incidental effects that women

have always excelled in, the episodical characterisation, I mean.” Appreciating the

“smaller realism” made possible by the story form, Wharton confesses to possessing

“the sense of authority with which I take hold of a short story” (Letters, 124). And,

significantly, in chapter two of The Writing of Fiction, entitled “Telling a Short Story,”

Wharton elucidates a clear distinction between short fiction and the novel,

demonstrating a cogent understanding of the short story’s aesthetic requirements.

10 Among those requirements is the story’s dependence on “situation” rather than “on

the gradual unfolding of the inner life of its characters” to which the novel is devoted

(Writing of Fiction, 48 and 42). Characters in short stories, then, will possess less of an

individual “inner life” which must be sacrificed to the story’s “situation.” In Wharton’s

stories, that dramatic situation often centers on the ways in which characters are

deprived of an inner life; thus the form of the story aids Wharton in enacting a

principal theme: that is, the psychological confinement of her characters. Wharton

writes that “the characters engaged” in short stories “must be a little more than

puppets; but apparently, also, they may be a little less than individual human beings”

(Writing of Fiction, 47). The ways in which her characters are puppets and not fully

autonomous selves is central in many of Wharton’s early short stories, which arguably

makes them her most naturalistic fictions.

11 While recognition of the early influence of literary naturalism on Wharton’s fiction is

relatively recent, the critical case for such an influence now enjoys acceptance. Indeed,

Donna M. Campbell has identified a naturalist impulse in Wharton’s first published

short story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (1891), which depicts an aging widow living a

cramped and lonely existence in a small room. Mrs. Manstey fails to prevent the


39

construction of a building extension that threatens the view from her single window.

Often in her short stories, Wharton explores the illusion of independent action, and the

dramatic use of this exploration is present in her fiction from the beginning. “Mrs.

Manstey’s View” ironically dramatizes the false belief in autonomy by presenting a

protagonist who dies while under the delusion that her actions have been successful.

Arguing for an analysis of Wharton as a writer “caught in the historical shift between

local color and naturalism,” Campbell discovers in this often overlooked story the

threatening nature of the “landscape of naturalism”, of an urban Hydra that recalls the

fiction of Frank Norris and Stephen Crane (152-3).

12 Even though it indicates Wharton’s interest in an ironic donnée, “Mrs. Manstey’s View”

does not reflect the aesthetic control of the more mature author. That literary maturity

is reflected in other stories by a deft merging of irony with narrative voice to implicate

the reader more closely in the realization of a character’s limitations. As critics have

noted, Wharton’s best short stories require the reader’s active, inferential engagement

to “meet her halfway and fill in the gaps” of meaning (White 24). Wharton’s frequent

use of ellipses has been interpreted as an attempt to “entice the reader to enter into

imaginative collaboration” with the narrator (Blackall 145), and her reliance in her

stories on “situation” over complex plot emphasizes thematic significance more than

action. In addition, her preference for the third-person limited point of view, strictly

focalized through a central consciousness, tends to place readers immediately within

an interpretive situation, instantly involving them with a single character’s vision and,

usually flawed, judgment. For Wharton the limited vision of the “reflector,” the

character from whose point of view the story is told, should be strictly enforced; as she

wrote in The Writing of Fiction, a short-story writer should “never... let the character

who serves as reflector record anything not naturally within his register” (46).

Naturalist novelists, preferring omniscient narrators and making frequent use of

authorial commentary, often create distance between a novel’s characters and its

readers, who are positioned as spectators5. Wharton’s limited reflectors, in contrast,

create kinship between protagonists and readers, for both find themselves in similar

interpretive situations.

13 The limits of the reflector have thematic significance in the story “The Other Two”

(1904), which is told from the point of view of Waythorn, a New York City stockbroker

who has recently married a twice-divorced woman. The story’s irony derives from the

reader’s growing awareness of Waythorn’s limited understanding of his wife’s past. He

believes that he knows Alice even as his view of her changes, but as Barbara A. White

notes, the story’s frequent use of economic imagery makes apparent the “limitations of

his vision” (17). Even though they tend to be as restricted as Wharton’s female

characters, her male characters are often deluded by their own sense of importance, a

sense that is reinforced by their social and economic position6.

14 Secure in his position as husband and successful businessman, Waythorn is confident

that he understands his new wife, an understanding the reader initially has no reason

to doubt. He appreciates her stable personality and “perfectly balanced nerves”. Early

in the story, as Waythorn waits for Alice to come down to dinner, he stands before “the

drawing-room hearth” thinking of her “composure,” one that “was restful to him; it

acted as ballast to his somewhat unstable sensibilities” (380). Although she has been

divorced from two men, Alice appears unperturbed by society’s negative view of

divorce. Waythorn admires her “way of surmounting obstacles without seeming to be


40

aware of them,” (381) but his admiration of her apparent mastery of external

circumstances blinds him to the fact that Alice is adept at masking her own feelings.

When she appears for dinner, Alice wears “her most engaging tea gown” but “she had

neglected to assume the smile that went with it” (382). Concerned about her daughter’s

health and about a visit from the girl’s father, Alice naturally cannot appear cheerful.

Waythorn tells her “to forget” her concern, and he is later confident “that she had

obeyed his injunction and forgotten” (382-83). In fact, as White points out, Waythorn

may simply be accepting Alice’s outward composure as a sign that she has indeed

forgotten her maternal worries. But Alice, the story makes clear, is an accomplished

pretender.

15 To make Waythorn happy, Alice pretends to be “serene and unruffled”; she works hard

to appear like “a creature all compact of harmonies” (385, 386). At first, Waythorn is

untroubled by Alice’s previous marriages because he believes these relationships have

left her unaffected. Alice’s past intrudes upon Waythorn’s harmony, however, when he

must allow Haskett, the first husband, to enter “his” house to visit Lily, the daughter

Haskett had with Alice – and when he has to begin a business relationship with Varick,

Alice’s second husband. In a significant scene, Alice mistakenly pours cognac into

Waythorn’s coffee, forgetting that it was Varick who preferred such a drink. Aware of

Varick’s preference, Waythorn begins to be disturbed by Alice’s history: “He had

fancied that a woman can shed her past like a man. But now he saw that Alice was

bound to hers both by the circumstances which forced her into continued relation with

it, and by the traces it had left on her nature” (393).

16 Waythorn’s opinion of his wife is changed but not deepened by this revelation, for she

simply becomes a different kind of possession to him. At first, he thought of her as a

rare object “whom Gus Varick had unearthed somewhere” (381). He believes that her

outward poise reflects her inner life, and he basks in the comfort of her attentions.

After close association with her previous husbands, however, Waythorn scorns Alice,

likening her to a common thing. “She was ‘as easy as an old shoe,” he thinks, “a shoe

that too many feet had worn” (393). At this point for Waythorn, Alice no longer

possesses an essential self: “Alice Haskett – Alice Varick – Alice Waythorn – she had

been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of

her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides” (393).

Waythorn thus considers himself only a partial investor in Alice; he “compared himself

to a member of a syndicate. He held so many shares in his wife’s personality and his

predecessors were his partners in the business” (393). From being an object that

belonged to him exclusively, Alice has changed for Waythorn into a “third of a wife” in

which he owns stock.

17 By perceiving of her as an object or an investment, Waythorn denies to Alice the

possibility of an essential identity. Only his valuation of her matters to him, a valuation

that she must constantly seek to maintain. “The Other Two” is not merely, as R. W. B.

Lewis terms it, a “comedy of manners” (134); it is, rather, an indication of the ways by

which a woman is divested of a coherent sense of self when she must always act in

accordance with a man’s expectations. White argues that “when she is viewed

independently of Waythorn,” Alice presents “an identity in shreds” (16).

18 Ironically, of course, a judgmental Waythorn is blind to his own limitations. He does

not perceive the full meaning of Alice’s reactions upon her meeting with both Haskett

and Varick in the library. Surprised to see her ex-husbands in the same room with her


41

current spouse, Alice betrays her emotions. Although she greets Varick “with a distinct

note of pleasure,” the sight of Haskett causes her “smile” to fade “for a moment”

(395-96). She quickly regains her mask, however, and Waythorn remains oblivious to

his wife’s true feelings. Both Waythorn and Alice, the reader eventually discerns, are

locked into fixed roles. They are not husband and wife but collector and possession.

Waythorn has enough discernment to appreciate Alice’s “value” to him, but his

utilitarian viewpoint prevents him from appreciating any of her possibly unique

qualities.

19 The terror of discovering oneself at the mercy of societal dictates afflicts both male and

female characters in Wharton’s stories. The male protagonist of “The Line of Least

Resistance” (1900), for instance, discovers the social costs of divorcing an unfaithful

wife and recognizes his lack of freedom. More often, however, Wharton’s social victims

are intelligent women who recognize society’s deleterious effect on their personal

development. Such is the case with Mrs. Clement Westall in “The Reckoning” (1902)

who is stripped of legal identity and emotional security when her husband asks for a

divorce in order to marry another woman. In an equally evocative story, Mrs. Vervain

of “The Dilettante” (1903) is forced to confront her vacant sense of self.

20 For seven years, Vervain has been the subject of Thursdale’s oppressive training in

emotional reticence and equivocation. Thursdale prides himself on his apt pupil: “He

had taught a good many women not to betray their feelings, but he had never before

had such fine material to work with” (412). The story begins with Thursdale about to

meet with Mrs. Vervain to discuss his fiancée, Miss Gaynor. Thursdale loves Miss

Gaynor, in part because she cannot control her emotions. He has introduced his fiancée

to his pupil and been delighted by the “naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met

Miss Gaynor” (412). Of course, Mrs. Vervain’s “natural” reaction was to suppress her

own feelings, and Thursdale once again goes to her to continue their game. Upon

entering the familiar house, Thursdale notes “the drawing room [which] at once

enveloped him in that atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Mrs. Vervain imparted to

her very furniture” (413). Introduced early as a metaphor for Mrs. Vervain herself, this

room will be instrumental in her ultimate self-revelation.

21 “The Dilettante” has been interpreted as a “feminist revenge story” in that Mrs.

Vervain succeeds by tricking Thursdale into revealing an undisguised emotion, and –

perhaps – gains a triumph by ending his engagement with Miss Gaynor (White 59). Mrs.

Vervain tells Thursdale that Miss Gaynor has come to visit a second time, and in his

anxious desire to learn the outcome of that visit, Thursdale declares, “You know I’m

absurdly in love” (414). Further twisting the knife, Mrs. Vervain confronts Thursdale

with his sin of withholding a genuine affection from her. But although she informs him

plainly that he “always hated... to have things happen: you never would let them,”

Thursdale, from whose point of view the story unfolds, misses her implication,

considering her words to be “incoherent” (415). Mrs. Vervain tells Thursdale that Miss

Gaynor has come to her to discover whether she and Thursdale had been lovers. When

Mrs. Vervain tells the truth – that she and Thursdale have never had a sexual

relationship – Miss Gaynor appears disappointed. She has apparently looked into

Thursdale’s “past” for evidence of a genuine passion, but having found none, Mrs.

Vervain intimates, Miss Gaynor will likely break her engagement. Naturally, Thursdale

despairs until Mrs. Vervain offers a potential solution. She urges him to lie about their

relationship, to suggest that they have indeed been lovers. She offers him, in short, her


42

social reputation, and the offer momentarily strips away all pretenses: “It was

extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most

complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls” (418). For once, they have shown

their true feelings.

22 The ambiguous ending complicates the story, making it difficult to accept revenge as its

subject7. It is not certain whether Miss Gaynor has in fact visited Mrs. Vervain a second

time or whether she has sent a letter to Thursdale to break off their engagement. Mrs.

Vervain could have fabricated the entire incident, and it is she who suggests that Miss

Gaynor may have written to Thursdale. Nor is it certain that Thursdale intends to break

the engagement himself, lest he turn Miss Gaynor into another Mrs. Vervain. Thus both

the success of Mrs. Vervain’s revenge and the possibility of Thursdale’s moral growth

are left in doubt.

23 A more obvious theme inheres in the story’s last sentence, which occurs after

Thursdale leaves: “The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful

emptiness of the room” (419). Representing her inner self, the “empty” drawing room

forces Mrs. Vervain to acknowledge her lack of individuality. The social propriety she

and Thursdale have practiced has led Mrs. Vervain to suppress emotion and passion, to

deny the expression of any personal desire that could make her unique. In her drawing

room, a barren site devoid of warmth, Mrs. Vervain recognizes a confinement of spirit.

By internalizing Thursdale’s training never to betray an emotion, she comes to betray

herself. Set within a single room that takes on metaphorical significance, “The

Dilettante” deftly merges form and theme.

24 Wharton’s highly praised “Souls Belated” (1899) is perhaps her best illustration of the

social restrictions women and men encounter when they try to establish a relationship

outside of marriage. The story’s naturalism is evident, as both main characters, Lydia

and Gannett, have their personal freedom curtailed by social decorum. The first story

by Wharton to make extensive use of the “prison cell” metaphor (Lewis 87), “Souls

Belated” presents a female character who desires an identity outside of the socially

determined one, but who is ultimately imprisoned by social approval.

25 Lydia, whose lack of a last name figures her absence of identity (White 58), has been

living with Gannett, a successful writer not her husband. Her divorce from Tillotson has

just been granted, so she is presumably free to marry Gannett. But for Lydia,

independence lies in not having to marry, in not having to follow the staid morality of

society. She becomes angry when Gannett assumes that she will indeed marry him.

Instead, she intends to pursue her version of personal liberty. Marriage to Tillotson

revealed to her the dreary obligation of “doing exactly the same thing every day at the

same hour” (106). Meeting Gannett relieves her of this “dull” life, and she revels in a

new-found freedom, even though she pretends “to look upon him as the instrument of

her liberation” (107) when in fact she recognizes that to be truly free she must leave

Gannett. Lydia is fully aware that social propriety restricts her individuality, but she

remains committed to living according to her own code. “Of course one acts as one

can,” she tells Gannett, “as one must, perhaps – pulled by all sorts of invisible threads;

but at least one needn’t pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that

ignores the complexity of human Motives – that classifies people by arbitrary signs,

and puts it in everybody’s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson’s visiting list” (110-11). As this

passage suggests, Lydia resists social determinism, its iron grip of propriety, its

insistence on uniformity, and its desire to render people in the simplest of terms.


43

26 Although to express her autonomy Lydia refuses to marry Gannett, nevertheless she

soon finds herself trapped in a naturalist environment. At the Hotel Bellosguardo, the

other guests assume she is married to Gannett, and she does not disabuse them of that

assumption. The hotel’s social order is policed by Lady Susan Condit who presupposes

that Lydia is Mrs. Gannett. Lydia’s security is threatened, however, when Mrs. Cope

tries to blackmail her into revealing what Cope’s young companion, Lord Trevenna, has

revealed to Gannett. Knowledge is the source of Mrs. Cope’s power over her young lord;

she needs to control him to ensure he will marry her once her divorce is final.

Perceiving that she and Lydia are “both in the same box,” (118) Mrs. Cope threatens to

expose the truth that Lydia and Gannett are not married. Even after Mrs. Cope’s threat

is averted, however, Lydia realizes that she enjoys the security of respectability, even

though having to pretend she is married belies her sense of freedom. Gannett again

asks her to marry him, but she refuses, knowing that society will still reject her because

she has been married before. To society she will appear to be a social pariah whom

Gannett has rehabilitated.

27 The story’s last section alters the point of view by narrating events from Gannett’s

perspective instead of Lydia’s, one of the few instances in Wharton’s short fiction of a

change in focalization. The effect creates more distance between Lydia and the reader.

But as we see her from the outside only, Lydia’s restriction comes sharply into focus

(White 59). As she tries to leave Gannett, he watches from a window while she retreats

from the steam launch and returns to the hotel. Implying that they will be married, the

story’s ending intimates that Lydia will have to give up not caring about society’s

opinion, which has been the principal expression of her desire for a free will.

28 This last section of the story also allows the sympathy Gannett feels for Lydia to

register keenly with the reader. Earlier in the story Gannett appears incapable of

understanding Lydia’s arguments for personal freedom; as the narration dryly notes,

“Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons

her emotions” (111). But watching her from the window, Gannett perceives “the cruelty

he had committed in detaching her from the normal conditions of life” (125). Gannett

may certainly be taking too much credit for ending Lydia’s marriage and severing her

from “normal” social relations, but he does sympathize with her limited choices: “Even

had his love lessened, he was bound to her now by a hundred ties of pity and self-

reproach; and she, poor child, must turn back to him as Latude returned to his cell”

(125). While aware that he and Lydia are “two separate beings,” Gannett nevertheless

recognizes the hard fact of their being “bound together in a noyade of passion that left

them resisting yet clinging as they went down” (125).

29 The story’s title implies the pathos of Gannett’s and Lydia’s “belated” attempt to live

independently of social opinion, thereby possessing their souls. In the end, they will

presumably travel to Paris to be married, for neither of them can resist society’s

pressure to conform. At one point early in the story, Lydia expressed their mutual

contempt for conformity:

“We neither of us believe in the abstract ‘sacredness’ of marriage; we both know

that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can

we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or

the secret longing to work our way back gradually – oh, very gradually – into the

esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and

hated?” (110)


44

30 Even in a hotel as remote as the Bellosguardo that “conventional morality” prevails,

denying independent action and the prerogatives of self-definition.

31 In these stories, Wharton’s social or drawing-room naturalism poignantly dramatizes

the struggle of individuals to resist a socially constructed sense of self. That struggle for

individuality occurs amid impersonal social forces that prevent self-definition.

Confined in drawing-rooms and in the compressed space of the short story form itself,

Wharton’s characters are often abruptly stripped of their affected autonomy. As a

result, her characters have more in common with the powerless naturalist character

that Lee Clark Mitchell identifies than with realist characters who exhibit mastery over,

or at least successfully negotiate, social forces.

32 Wharton understood, furthermore, that characters in short stories are by necessity

more limited than characters in novels. Yet, for Wharton this requirement offers a

thematic opportunity in that she is able to use her short story characters as symbols of

socially determined lives. Recently, narrative theorists have argued that characters in

short stories may be interpreted more readily as symbols than characters in novels.

Charles E. May, for example, argues that characters in short fiction are often “symbolic

projections” that serve aesthetic and thematic functions (66-7). These characters

frequently act according to the needs of a story’s plot and theme, becoming “stylized

figures rather than ‘real people’” (64). As a naturalist writer, Wharton is interested in

portraying static, socially determined characters without an essential identity, figures

of determinism. This portrayal is assisted by the short story’s formal requirements vis-

à-vis characterization8.

33 Social determinism remains a consistent theme in Wharton’s stories throughout her

career, as she continued to take advantage of the short story’s compressed form to

dramatize the limited inner lives of her characters and their inability to control

personal destiny9. Wharton shared this struggle for autonomy with her protagonists,

but she eventually discovered freedom in the creation of art. She found a way “to do”

and not simply “to be”. On the small canvas of much of her short fiction, however,

Wharton’s characters are arrested in passive poses while nonetheless offering an

appeal to the reader’s sympathy. Readers of these stories may share with characters

such as Lydia and Gannett the disturbing recognition of an illusory free will, of the

absence of hope for a unified selfhood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner’s

Sons, 1994.

Blackall, Jean Frantz. “Edith Wharton’s Art of Ellipsis.” Journal of Narrative Technique 17 (1987):

145-62.

Bowlby, Rachel. Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. New York: Methuen, 1985.


45

Brown, Suzanne Hunter. “The Chronotope of the Short Story: Time, Character, and Brevity.”

Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story. Ed. Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr. Lewiston, NY: Edwin

Mellen Press, 1997. 181-213.

Campbell, Donna M. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915.

Athens: Ohio UP, 1997.

Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Howard, June. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P,

1985.

Kaye, Richard A. “Textual Hermeneutics and Belated Male Heroism: Edith Wharton’s Revisions of

The House of Mirth and the Resistance to American Literary Naturalism.” Arizona Quarterly 52

(1995): 87-116.

Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1993.

Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

May, Charles E. “Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction: ‘In the Beginning Was the Story.’” Short

Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

UP, 1989. 62-73.

Merish, Lori. “Engendering Naturalism: Narrative Form and Commodity Spectacle in U. S.

Naturalist Fiction.” Novel 29 (1996): 319-45.

Mitchell, Lee Clark. Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia UP,

1989.

Nettels, Elsa. “Gender and First-Person Narration in Edith Wharton’s Short Fiction.” Edith

Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1992.

245-60.

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934.

—. The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton. Vol. 1. Ed. R. W. B. Lewis. New York: Charles Scribner’s

Sons, 1968.

—. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Collier Books, 1988.

—. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.

White, Barbara A. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1991.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. 2nd ed. Reading, Mass.:

Merloyd Lawrence, 1995.

NOTES

1. . Shari Benstock provides a different view of Wharton’s childhood and her mother’s reaction to

her desire to “make up” stories and to play as a “tomboy,” 20-21.

2. . This painting, done by Edward Harrison May, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in

Washington D.C. It is dated 1870, but Benstock identifies Edith’s age as five years, (13).

3. . Page references refer to volume one of R. W. B. Lewis’s edition of Wharton’s collected stories.


46

4. . Lee Clark Mitchell argues persuasively for the essential difference between autonomous and

self-defining realist characters and passive naturalist characters whose sense of self is

determined by external circumstance, 1-33.

5. . See Howard and Rachel Bowlby on naturalist novels as spectacle.

6. . On the self-importance of Wharton’s male characters, see Elsa Nettels, 252.

7. . Indeed, White ultimately rejects the revenge theme entirely, 59.

8. . See also Suzanne Hunter Brown’s theory that the “[t]echnical factors” of short stories “lead

many short-story writers to project an individual’s nature as an essential given,” 199.

9. . See, for example, the often anthologized “Roman Fever” (1934) in which a woman’s actions,

inspired by jealously and hatred, result in a sudden realization that strips her of an assumed

superiority.

ABSTRACTS

En mettant l'accent sur le naturalisme de salon ou le déterminisme social, cet article établit les

liens entre le fond et la forme des nouvelles d'Edith Wharton qui furent publiées au début du

XIXème siècle. L'analyse de trois nouvelles représentatives de son œuvre, "The Other Two", "The

Dilettante" et "Souls Belated" laisse apparaître un manque d'autonomie chez les personnages

féminins auxquels on refuse tout privilège d'accomplissement de soi. Les personnages de

Wharton mènent des existences souvent conditionnées par des circonstances sociales

extérieures, et la mise en scène de ces personnages prenant conscience de ces circonstances

aliénantes est servie par les exigences imposées par la forme même de la nouvelle. La longueur

restreinte et la forme condensée caractéristiques du genre permettent à Wharton de théâtraliser,

certains diront avec moins d'ambiguïté que dans ses romans, les forces inéluctables déployées

contre ses personnages. De plus, de par le fait que l'intérêt dramatique de nombreuses nouvelles

de Wharton écrites au début de sa carrière vienne de personnages qui, à défaut de s'affirmer,

deviennent de simples "pantins", ces nouvelles devraient être classées parmi ses œuvres de

fiction les plus naturalistes.

AUTHORS

SCOTT EMMERT

Scott D. Emmert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin – Fox Valley. He

has published articles in Journal of American Culture and Dreiser Studies, and is the author of Loaded

Fictions: Social Critique in the Twentieth-Century Western (U of Idaho P, 1996).


47

Mourning and Melancholia in JohnUpdike’s Short Story “His MotherInside Him”

Aristie Trendel

1 John Updike’s short story “His Mother Inside Him” (The Afterlife) along with two other

stories “The Sandstone Farmhouse” (The Afterlife) and “The Cats” (Licks of Love) is the

author’s short trilogy on mourning. “His Mother Inside Him”, a relatively short but

very dense story, features a son solely and exclusively preoccupied by his dead mother.

If “The Sandstone Farmhouse” was a tentative working over, “His Mother Inside Him”

is a tentative mourning which turns out to be a titanic task against a besetting,

haunting mother. In a way, the story picks up the narrative thread where “The

Sandstone Farmhouse” left it off. The mother’s death no longer seems a recent event

but it is still the main determinant of the filial psychical reality which prolongs the lost

object. The most vivid mental picture on the son’s cinematic screen is the mother-son’s

matrimonial parade “in and out of hospitals” pointing back to the “Sandstone

Farmhouse”. Yet the maternal symbol–the house–has been removed and mother and

son find themselves in a naked showdown without the mediating sheltering space.

Indeed, the splitting of imago into a good and bad mother which had moved towards

integration in “The Sandstone Farmhouse”, forcefully returns in “His Mother Inside

Him”. The male character is a return, too, of a previous character, Allen Dow. Thus the

story also establishes, in a more direct way, a dialogue with the tormented universe of

“Flight” (Pigeon Feathers). A summary provides the temporal link between the two short

stories separated by four decades: “It took him decades of living hundreds of miles

beyond her reach to begin to breathe, to sleep, and to speak normally”(234). The

mother’s vision on the Shale Hill in “Flight” is mentioned in “His Mother Inside Him” as

irrefutable evidence of the mother’s making of the son which was only implied in the

former story. Indeed, “His Mother Inside Him” states in a forthright way what the

other stories have suggested all along, the fixation on the mother, which has opened

the way to “the reversibility” of time, that is to regression. “The Mother Inside Him”


48

can be read as a story of refusal of the mother’s loss, of unaccomplished mourning and

regression.

2 If “The Sandstone Farmhouse” overflowed with the son’s memories of the mother and

established a remembering ego, “His Mother Inside Him” depicts the fusion of filial and

maternal images and deals with a specular ego: “Allen’s mother had implanted him

with a set of images that entwined, flourishing and fading, among those he had

acquired with his own senses.”(236). Lacan ’s concept of the imaginary, one of the three

registers in the psychoanalytic field along with the symbolic and the real, is relevant

here. Allen Dow stands in front of the mirror trying to assess the extent of his

resemblance to his mother; the similarities of form lead him back to those images,

component parts of his identity. Indeed, if those model images spring from the mother,

the story, a third-person narrative, further proves this point through a confusion and

interchangeability of the personal pronouns, he and she and the proper and common

nouns, Allen and his mother: “she had turned to nature for comfort, and now as he

aged, the vast restless natural presence (...) pressed upon him (...) His mother had had a

nature-lover’s hatred of smoking and drinking and Allen had relinquished both habits

years ago”(239). Identification seems to be an on-going, never-ending process: “all of

Allen’s ideas came from her, save the male boyish idea of getting away, of getting out

into unheated, unmediated space. Even that, in truth, had been her idea“; (238).

Refuting serves only to assert more forcefully the dialectics of desire as the adjective

“unheated“ suggests. The son’s space is the mother’s heated, mediated space.

Furthermore, the story relates the reiterative motif of the son as the mother’s knight to

the Lacanian register: “When his mother died he became the sole custodian of

hundreds of small mental pictures”(237). The identification with the mother seems to

ensure her survival. The son’s ultimate mission becomes her revival through him. The

passage from images to signs and thus from the imaginary to the symbolic is carried

out by the same syntax and the same metaphor: “when she died he became custodian of

specialised semiotics, a thousand tiny nuanced understandings of her, a once

commonplace language of which he was now the sole surviving speaker”(237). Indeed,

the story is structured on “those specialised semiotics”, the signs and symbols of the

unconscious.

3 The title of the story, a phrase also to be found in the story, evokes “the infant’s first

object relation, the relation to the mother’s breast and to the mother” according to

Melanie Klein1. The term “custodian”, quoted above, twice repeated in the story,

indicates this reversal of roles. There is no need for the house in this story. The son

himself has become the house to accommodate the mother. The story successively

deals with these two processes that make the accommodation possible–introjection and

incorporation. Although they have often been treated as synonymous, their difference

lies in the fact that the latter term implies a crossing over the corporeal limit. Both

processes have ambivalence in common.

4 Indeed affective ambivalence permeates the whole story which starts with an overview

of mother’s and son’s life in terms of affects. An unhappy, tortured, torturing mother, a

Fury, a Maenad, a bellicose Amazon and a worshipping, terrified phobic son, point back

again to some Ishtar-Tammouz-like mythic couple. An overview of six decades

retrieves a single, telling event: “his father cowering under the dining table while his

mother, red-faced with fury, tried to get at him to slap him again”. (234). The father

figure, weak and pathetic in other stories, here shrinks to a frightful powerlessness


49

which has rendered the son unforgiving towards the mother, perplexed after her death

and resentful of his resemblance to her which the others point out to him. Embarking

on an examination of this resemblance, the son finds himself at grips with his

introjected mother: “It surprised him, unpleasantly, when his mother’s laugh, its

unmistakable sly cry and shy trailing-off, came out of his mouth”(236). In the rising

scale of emotions, it is not the Pythagorian harmony of the spheres that is heard but

once again the Empedoclean hate, neikos, “within him his mother was battling his

mother”(237). Ambivalence is not only suggested but clearly stated: “Or, rather, he felt

about land, as about his mother, ambivalent, she having planted in him the idea that

the land was sacred, a piece of Mother Earth, endlessly valuable”(237). As in

“Home”(Pigeon Feathers), the mother becomes synonymous with the land, endlessly

valuable, too, turned into the idealised Great Goddess whose image is implied in some

of the stories about mother and son. As in “Museums and Women” (Museums And

Women), the compulsion to repeat originates from the fixation on the mother: “It

seemed to be his circular fate to settle one woman after another on a sizeable property

and then move on, momentarily free, until the next female real-estate developer locked

him into her plans”. (237). The mother features both as a shelter-provider and a prison-

keeper, representing both security and suffocation.

5 What in fact provokes this unhindered statement of ambivalence? It seems to be the

loss of the love-object. If the mother’s loss triggered the free flow of memories in “The

Sandstone Farmhouse”, in “His Mother Inside Him” it allows for signs of ambivalence

to take over the story. Affective ambivalence is typical of mourning whose task is to

liberate the ego from the cathected lost object. Freud drew a comparison between

normal states of mourning and melancholia which, like mourning, ensues from the loss

of the loved object. He made a correlation between the two states based on the

similarities of the two conditions, that is dejection, lack of interest in the outside world,

cessation of activity and loss of capacity to love. The character in the story is endowed

with manifest, melancholic traits which point to a melancholic disposition: “She made

him nervous, and nervousness became his mode. All the complaints of nervousness –

skin rashes, stammering, asthma, insomnia–were his.”(234). It comes as no surprise

that after her death the world becomes a waste land and he the disconsolate ghost of

the void: “He wandered a world without features, just grass and sky, as in Brazil’s Mato

Gross, the last of his tribe”. (240). The lack of interest in the outside world is

rationalised: “sirens grown faint and hoarse with age”(240). It is viewed as a result of

age. This impoverishment of the world is accompanied by an impoverishment of the

ego: “as the sun grew higher an emptiness from within was too sharp, too

persistent”(241). The disturbance of self-regard absent in mourning, seems present,

too, in “the sensation that his life was too small” (241), which reveals a sense of

inferiority through the polysemy of small, highlighted in the text by the italics. After

these considerations the most salient feature in the story, its ambivalence, could be

better understood. Moreover, ambivalence pushes back the melancholic’s erotic

cathexis to the stage of sadism. The reader has been prepared for this: “The women

who drew close to him in the course of his life tended to suffer, and it took no great

insight of his to imagine why his heart was, in regard to their sufferings, rather aloof

and cool, if not faintly exultant”(234). Affective ambivalence is not only typical of

mourning but also of the oral cannibalistic phase of libidinal development. It is quite

interesting that Karl Abraham suggested a connection between melancholia and that


50

oral stage. In a melancholic state, the libido seems to regress to that phase and the

melancholic wants to incorporate his object of desire.

6 There is one element missing in the story from the clinical picture of melancholia, the

refusal to eat, anorexia. On the contrary, the reverse eating disorder appears, bulimia,

which is also a manifestation of a depressive state:

Hungry–he could not stop eating. After a full dinner, while his wife loaded the

dishwasher, he would rummage rather frantically in the breadbox and the

cupboards, scarcely conscious of what he was doing, and stuff his mouth with

cookies, peanuts, raisins (240).

7 The fear of being without shelter which was manifested in the story - “where would he

have lived, but for these landed women? On the streets? In the trees?”(237) - is

succeeded, after the mother’s death, by the fear of starvation which points to the

original fusion of hunger and love.

8 The Lacanian register of the real points here to the food in the mouth, a substitute for

the mother’s breast. Indeed, eating is presented in the story as “an act of

memorisation”(240) and food is described sensually and exaltedly:

Food, all the other sirens having grown faint and hoarse with age, now sang to him

penetratingly–the edginess of food; the friability; the saltiness or sweetness of it in

the ardent moment of first contact with his membranes. (240).

9 The way the character relates to food reveals the erogenous significance of the mouth.

Food, then, becomes the ultimate, perilous siren that has the faculty of stirring memory

to an unknown loss. The same plight has been set for the mother: “Sometimes, when he

thought back on it, it had been she who was going to the doctor, for female reasons that

belonged to the dark subterrain of her unhappiness”. (238). Mother and son are united

by the same sense of loss. Eating, originating in the process of identification, unearths

the process of incorporation.

10 Karl Abraham has drawn six phases of libidinal development in his history of object

love. The oral cannibalistic phase in fact succeeds the earliest precocious oral phase

which is pre-ambivalent and auto-erotic. Indeed, as Abraham states, the melancholic

cannot escape his ambivalence which claims the destruction of the love object: “the

ruminative pulverising and liquefying and incorporating of it.” (240) in the narrator’s

own words. It is accompanied by the nostalgia of the earliest phase whose instinctual

aim is suction. The story is laced with nostalgia all the more striking in the middle of

inner strife: “His mother would have known; she would have shared with him the

vanished texture of this lost world.” (240). The sibilant lament of the disconsolate son

reaches the reader here. Melanie Klein also speaks of the nostalgia of the love object, a

component part of her depressive position, where defence and nostalgia stand side by

side.

11 When this position is related to mourning, Klein states, it entails the danger of an inner

break-up. The panic that the character experiences at the ending of the story suggests

internal rupture and regression:

As the last of a jar of sugared peanuts... disappeared into his insides, smothering the

suppressed panic there–not so much the fear of death as the sensation that his life

was too small–he smiled to think that his mother reached this point at the age of

thirty, whereas he was all of sixty. As they tell you in seventh-grade health class,

girls develop more rapidly than boys. (241).

12 Updike chooses to end “His Mother Inside Him” with a flash of irony, a master stroke

sealing the destiny of the character and the density of the story since “no other form of


51

human communication does so with such speed and economy” as Wayne Booth says

about irony2. If “The Sandstone Farmhouse” was marked by expansiveness, “His

Mother Inside Him” is marked by compactness. The irony targets both mother and son

and points to the beginning of the story which tackles the question of the mother’s

unhappiness introjected by the son. Like “Ace in the Hole” (The Same Door), then, “His

Mother Inside Him” has a circular structure suggesting the son’s “circular fate”(237)

back to his infantile love implied at the end of the story: “Eating was a way, his only

remaining way, of intersecting with the world.”(241). The puer aeternus motive has been

pushed to the extreme, correlating with the castrating mother who armed like Zeus

with a thunder-like temper “flattened the other occupants of the house” (234). Thus

irony, the hall mark of Updike’s style, becomes the communicating vessel which

contains literature and psychoanalysis, whose collaboration some critics deny.

13 It is precisely the son’s maturity which is questioned at the ending of the story and

could remind the reader of the character’s self irony in Of The Farm: “I’ve always felt

young for my age”. As “The Sandstone Farmhouse” suggested a return to the uterus,

“His Mother Inside Him” suggests a return to the breast. “We are all the result of sexual

events, and their faded heat still warms us”(236), says the narrator in Updike’s

aphoristic turn of style. The sexual event suggested in the story is an infantile kind of

satisfaction in a past where the character has been anchored.

14 If the hole, then, is a symbol of genital love in Updike’s stories, the mouth in “His

Mother Inside Him”, an image of the hole as the first erogenous zone, becomes a

symbol of pre-genital love. Furthermore, if the earliest stories about mother and son

were built on repression, “His Mother Inside Him” is built on regression. Both

repression and regression indicate an inner temporality which disregards the external

one. The story anticipates the third part of Updike’s trilogy on mourning, “The Cats”, a

story built on projection which is another modality of object relation. Updike fathoms

in these stories the depth of the unconscious which becomes the invisible character in

the wings of the text. Psychoanalysis is a tool to detect and tackle this powerful guest

star which only the reader could bring in the spotlight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John Updike, The Afterlife and Other Stories, New York, Knopf, 1994.

Karl Abraham, Oeuvres Complètes II, Paris, Payot, 1965.

Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, Penguin, 1991.

—. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II, London, The

Hogarth Press, 1955.

Melanie Klein, Envy And Gratitude, London, Tavistock Publications, 1959.

—. Essais de psychanalyse 1921-1945, Paris, Payot, 1968.

Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 1999.


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—. Le Séminaire livre IV , La relation d’objet, Paris, Seuil, 1994.

J.Laplanche-J.B.Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse, Paris PUF, 1967.

NOTES

1. . “If this primal object which is introjected, takes root in the ego with relative security, the

basis for a satisfactory development is laid.

The good breast is taken in and becomes part of the ego, and the infant who was first inside the

mother now has the mother inside himself.”(Envy and Gratitude p. 3)

2. . Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1974, p. 13.

ABSTRACTS

La nouvelle de John Updike “Sa mère en lui” explore l’amour d’objet basé sur l’ambivalence.

L’amour filial pour la mère est examiné à travers les quatre concepts psychanalytiques de

l’identification, l’introjection, l’incorporation et la régression, mis en évidence par l’état de deuil

et de mélancolie. Au fur et à mesure que le chagrin augmente, le fils régresse au stade infantile.

Cette interprétation utilise les travaux de Freud, Abraham, Klein et Lacan et préconise la

collaboration entre la psychanalyse et la littérature pour appréhender cette nouvelle dénuée

d’intrigue, où toute l’action est psychique.

AUTHORS

ARISTIE TRENDEL

Aristie Triantafyllidou-Trendel teaches American literature at Robert Schuman University in

Strasbourg. She is currently writing her Ph D dissertation on John Updike’s short fiction and has

also published several short stories.


53

The Return to Shiloh: Family andFantasy in Bobbie Ann Mason’s“Shiloh”

Greg W. Bentley

1 The criticism on Bobbie Ann Mason’s fiction centers largely on the individual’s

relationship to society, on how culture–especially pop culture–influences the

individual, particularly on how it shapes social roles or how it affects gender

transformations.1 Even though this issue is a fundamental element of her work, Mason,

to a predominant degree, focuses on the individual’s function within a smaller social

unit: the family. That is, she more often than not concentrates on the individual’s

relationships to other family members and how these relationships positively or

negatively affect the individual’s psychic formation, how they affect the development

of or the foreclosure on subjectivity. This relationship of the individual to the family,

moreover, has fairly recently become the primary focus of psychoanalytic semiotics,

most notably in the work of Kaja Silverman. While she does not neglect the individual’s

relationship to society–in fact, Silverman insists on “the necessity of reading sexuality

in relation to the larger social order” (1), she nevertheless centers on the family as the

locus of her interrogation of “libidinal politics,” of what, she says, “might be called the

‘politics’ of desire and identification” (1). Libidinal politics, then, “articulates not only

the legal, economic and religious, but the psychic ties linking parents and child” (39).

More specifically, “[t]he ideology of the family defines the parents as privileged objects

for desire and identification, and so works to eroticize precisely those relationships

which kinship, in the guise of the incest prohibition, forbids. It promotes libidinal ties

between brother and sister, and parents and children” (39). By looking at “Shiloh” from

the perspective of the ideology of the family, I propose to map the libidinal politics of

the Moffitt family.

2 “Shiloh” centers on the gradual disintegration of Norma Jean and Leroy Moffitt’s

marriage. When Leroy injures his leg in a traffic accident, he can no longer drive his 18-

wheeler. Confined to the house to convalesce, Leroy passes time by smoking marijuana

and putting together craft kits. In addition, some 16 years before Leroy’s accident,


54

Norma Jean and Leroy’s infant son, Randy, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Presumably, as a result of these two incidents, Mabel, Norma Jean’s mother, spends a

good deal of time at her daughter’s house. During Leroy’s recuperation, moreover,

Norma Jean begins a series of new activities: weight training, playing the organ,

cooking exotic foods, and taking a composition course at the local community college.

Unable to comprehend Norma Jean’s “strange” behavior, Mabel decides that she needs

a change of scenery, so she encourages Leroy to take Norma Jean on a second

honeymoon to Shiloh, the Civil War memorial and battleground–which is also the site

of Mabel’s honeymoon and Norma Jean’s conception. Mabel secretly hopes that the trip

will rekindle Norma Jean and Leroy’s marriage and family. Ironically, however, in the

middle of their picnic lunch, Norma Jean tells Leroy that she wants to leave him. After

walking away from Leroy, Norma Jean stands on the bluff that overlooks the Tennessee

River. The story ends when she turns back to Leroy and waves her arms. Ostensibly,

then, the story revolves around Norma Jean and Leroy’s trip to the Civil War memorial

of the same name. However, their trip, as I argue in this essay, functions only as the

physical manifestation of a more important psychic trip: Mabel’s fantasy–her

imaginary return to Shiloh. That is, Mabel desires Norma Jean and Leroy to travel to

Shiloh because the trip embodies her imaginary return to it, a fantasy that not only

represents the unity of the family for her, but one that also signifies her own unity and

adequacy–the wholeness and sufficiency of her subjectivity.

3 First, though, behind the action proper of “Shiloh,” Mason posits the idea of the

normative family, and it originates at Shiloh. In a reverie about the battle at Shiloh,

Leroy thinks: “General Grant, drunk and furious, shoved the Southerners back to

Corinth, where Mabel and Jet Beasley were married years later, when Mabel was still

thin and good-looking. The next day, Mabel and Jet visited the battleground, and then

Norma Jean was born...” (113-14). Although “spoken” by Leroy, this scenario articulates

Mabel’s idea of the normative family and her position in it as wife and mother; it is the

mise-en-scene of her desire.

4 However, this family is not quite as normative or as unified as it first appears. As the

narrator says, Mabel’s husband, Jet, “died of a perforated ulcer when Norma Jean was

ten” (110). While the narrator never states it overtly, the nature of Jet’s illness and

death suggests that perhaps there was a good deal of tension between Mabel and him

and that he developed a habit of internalizing the stress to the point that it killed him.

As the story unfolds, moreover, we see that perhaps Mabel was the primary source of

that stress. From very early in her marriage, then, Mabel, in addition to being Norma

Jean’s mother, “usurps” the roles of husband and father. That is, even though she is

biologically a woman, Mabel becomes the “man” in the family, and, as Silverman points

out, “our ‘dominant fiction’ or ideological ‘reality’ solicits our faith above all else in the

unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject” (15-16). By collapsing all

three roles into one, Mabel not only ensures family “unity,” but she also secures her

adequacy and self-sufficiency within the family structure. She becomes the sole

proprietor and the sole executor of the phallus.

5 When Norma Jean marries Leroy, a second form of the normative family comes into

being. Very quickly, Norma Jean and Leroy have a baby, a son, Randy. With all the

elements in place–father, mother, child–Mabel can assume her role as the doting

grandmother. Her subjectivity–her positionality vis-a-vis the family structure--is

secure, clear, and adequate. This family, too, however, is not quite as normative or as


55

unified as it first appears. Norma Jean and Leroy marry because Norma Jean gets

pregnant, a fact that not only shames Mabel but one that she entirely blames on Leroy.

As Mason writes, “Mabel has never really forgiven him for disgracing her by getting

Norma Jean pregnant” (102). By overtly blaming Leroy for “appropriating” Norma Jean

and by implicitly blaming him for dislodging her from her positionality within the

normative family structure, Mabel succumbs to the conventional masculine

méconnaisance necessary to maintain phallic identification. Lacan calls this

misrecognition a “failure to recognize,” and, as Silverman observes, this failure “can

take two forms, depending upon its object; it can pertain either to the self or the other.

The subject classically refuses to recognize an unwanted feature of the self by

projecting it onto the other, i. e. by relocating it. He or she refuses to recognize an

unpleasurable or anxiety-inducing aspect of the other by disavowing it, a process which

sometimes requires the support of a fetish” (45). Mabel feels that Leroy has stolen

Norma Jean from her, and thus his act destroys her initial idea of a “unified” family.

Also, Mabel experiences a sense of diminishment as a result of Norma Jean’s pregnancy.

Thus, she feels a double sense of inadequacy; Norma Jean and Leroy’s marriage

minimizes her positionality as Norma Jean’s mother and father, for Leroy has “stolen”

her daughter, and Mabel’s sense of disgrace marginalizes her sense of subjectivity

because it creates a lack, a diminishment of her sense of her own wholeness and

personal sufficiency.

6 In addition, the unity of this second “normative” family physically dissolves quite early

as well, for Randy “die[s] at the age of four months and three days” (101). Just as she

blamed Leroy for her loss of Norma Jean–and thus her place in the first family

structure–Mabel blames Norma Jean for her loss of Randy–and thus the loss of her

place in the second family structure. On one of her ritual Saturday visits, Mabel tells

the story about how a “datsun” dog was put on trial for killing a baby and chewing its

legs off while the mother was in the next room the whole time. Because Norma Jean is

vacuuming in the next room and trying to block out her mother’s tale–and the

accusation implicit within it because she has obviously heard it before in a variety of

similar stories–Mabel yells above the roar of the vacuum so that Norma Jean will have

to hear the trial’s verdict–and from Mabel’s perspective its applicability to Norma

Jean’s treatment or mistreatment of her son–“they thought it was neglect” (107). For

Mabel, the loss of her positionality within the first two family structures constitutes a

form of castration. The physical and psychic losses which she experiences, however,

function primarily as symptoms of an earlier, more profound, lack. As Silverman

writes:

[i]f, as Althusser suggests, the Law of Language represents ‘the absolute

precondition for the existence and intelligibility of the unconscious,’ then it can

best be understood in terms of the Lacanian binarism, ‘your meaning or you life’–as

the unavoidable castration which every subject must experience upon entering the

order of language or signification, its inauguration into a regime of lack. This

castration or lack entails both the loss of being, and the subject’s subordination to a

discursive order which pre-exists, exceeds, and substantially ‘speaks it’. (35)

7 In effect, then, Mabel, by telling the story of the “datsun” dog, wields the phallus

imperialistically not only to assert her power and privilege over her daughter, but also,

and more importantly, she wields it tyrannically to try discursively to cover over her

lack. By blaming Leroy for the loss of her place within the first family structure and by

blaming Norma Jean for a similar loss within the second family structure, Mabel desires


56

to keep her power and privilege by maintaining possession of the phallus. In order to

do so, she has resorted to two of the conventional masculine strategies to cover over

her castration: disavowal and projection.

8 Leroy’s accident ironically creates a third family structure. While it appears to be a

“normative” family on the surface, it in fact turns out to be quite abnormal, for its

elements fail to conform to those of the typical family. Because of his wound, Leroy is

forced to stay at home. Rather than create a bond, a renewed intimacy between him

and Norma Jean, his presence ironically produces their complete estrangement. In

Norma Jean’s absence from Leroy, Mabel, who still plays the father/mother role in

Norma Jean and Leroy’s marriage, steps in to become Leroy’s surrogate wife, and

figuratively Norma Jean becomes their child. And Mason carefully crafts this third

family structure. For example, Mabel not only spends an inordinate amount of time at

Norma Jean and Leroy’s house, but she and Leroy share the kitchen table more often

and more intimately than do Norma Jean and Leroy. In addition, Leroy talks more

openly and more personally with Mabel than he ever did with Norma Jean: “[o]ne day,

Mabel is there before Norma Jean gets home from work, and Leroy finds himself

confiding in her” (109). Their confidences, of course, focus on their “daughter,” Norma

Jean. As Mabel says, “‘I don’t know what got into that girl [...]. She used to go to bed

with the chickens. Now you say she’s up all hours. Plus her a-smoking. I liked to died’”

(109). Indeed, within this family structure, Norma Jean feels like an adolescent caught

between two well-meaning but oppressive parents. As Norma Jean tells Leroy, “‘she

[Mabel] won’t leave me alone–you won’t leave me alone [...]. I feel eighteen again. I can’t

face that all over again’” (113). Sensing not only the instability of this family structure,

but also the insecurity of her positionality within it, Mabel tries to cover over the lack

in her subjectivity by coercing Norma Jean and Leroy to take a trip to Shiloh, a journey

that functions as Mabel’s vicarious return, and one that she hopes will recreate the re-

union not only of the unity of her normative family and her positionality within it, but

one that will also construct a re-union of her subjectivity by covering over her lack and

assuaging her desire.

9 For Mabel, then, Norma Jean and Leroy’s trip to Shiloh will potentially construct a

fourth family structure, and it is decidedly Mabel’s fantasy family. That is, as Freud

suggests in The Interpretation of Dreams, the center of subjectivity lies in the

unconscious, not consciousness. Freud considers consciousness as a repository for

external stimuli, which then become psychically processed. Consequently, “reality”,

rather than being formed within the domain of consciousness, becomes established

within the unconscious, the psychic space closed off from consciousness by repression.

Thus, Freud illustrates not only how psychic reality rarely corresponds to “objective

fact”, but he also indicates how the subject attributes “reality” to representation. For

the psyche, fantasy possesses all the power and truth-value of actuality (Silverman 18).

If fantasy is “reality” for the subject, then, “that is because it articulates the particular

libidinal scenario or tableau through which each of us lives those aspects of the double

Oedipus complex which are decisive for us–because it articulates, in short, our symbolic

positionality, and the mise-en-scène of our desire” (Silverman 18). Because she has lost

her positionality within the dominant fiction and because she has lost her sense of

wholeness, Mabel psychically becomes nothing and lives nowhere, but since every

subject lives its desire from someplace, and it articulates its position by means of

fantasy, the scene within which desire is staged concerns itself with the placement of


57

the subject. Agreeing with Laplanche and Pontalis, Silverman contends that “fantasy is

less about the visualization and imaginary appropriation of the other than about the

articulation of the subjective locus–that it is ‘not an object that the subject imagines and

aims at... but rather a sequence in which the subject has [her] own part to play’” (6).

Thus, the sequence of events that have produced the disintegration not only of Mabel’s

concept of the normative family and her positionality within it, but also the

disintegration of her sense of subjective wholeness compels her to construct a fantasy

family that will restore her power, privilege, and positionality. By arranging Norma

Jean’s and Leroy’s trip to Shiloh, Mabel initiates the sequence of events that she thinks

will produce her re-integration–the unity of her family and her sense of wholeness and

sufficiency within it.

10 Mabel hopes that the outcome of Norma Jean and Leroy’s trip to Shiloh will be another

baby, and, in this sense, their “virtual” baby functions as Mabel’s fetish, her objet petit a.

Describing the close connection between fantasy and fetishism, Silverman writes:

“[f]antasy passes for reality at the level of the unconscious because it is propelled by

desire for the foreclosed real. Although this desire, which is born with language, is

fundamentally ‘a desire for nothing,’ fantasy defines it as a desire for something. It

posits a given object as that which is capable of restoring lost wholeness to the subject”

(20). Because she and Jet went there on their honeymoon and because Norma Jean was

conceived there, Mabel manipulates Norma Jean and Leroy into taking the trip to

Shiloh in order to overcome her lack and to fulfill her desires. Since fetishism is the

third principal means by which the masculine subject tries to cover over his lack,

Mabel fantasizes that Norma Jean and Leroy will on their trip to Shiloh fall in love again

and conceive a “replacement” for Randy. By believing whole-heartedly in her fantasy/

fetish, Mabel tries to ensure her psychic wholeness and her masculine positionality

within the dominant fiction. As Silverman clearly points out, even though Freud

overtly claims that a fetish functions as a psychic mechanism to defend the male

against female lack, in his essay “Fetishism” Freud “implicitly shows it to be a defense

against what is in the final analysis male lack. Since woman’s anatomical ‘wound’ is the

product of an externalizing displacement of masculine insufficiency, which is then

biologically naturalized, the castration against which the male subject protects himself

through disavowal and fetishism must be primarily his own” (46). Because Mabel so

completely and so absolutely becomes a “man”, she sets up a sequence of events–a

fantasy–which includes a clearly defined fetish–by means of which she, like the

conventional male subject, attempts to cover over her lack.2

11 When Leroy mistakenly thinks that Mabel has been hinting that she wants to go to

Shiloh herself, Leroy suggests to Norma Jean that they all go. Before Norma Jean can

speak, though, Mabel reveals her ulterior motive for suggesting the trip: “‘I’m not going

to butt in on anybody’s second honeymoon’” (110). Although he remains largely

unconscious of it, Leroy plays a complicit role in Mabel’s fantasy. When Norma Jean

tells Leroy that she wants to leave him, Leroy responds: “‘you and me could start all

over again. Right back at the beginning’” (113). Aware of Leroy’s–and Mabel’s–

inadequacies, however, Norma Jean rejects the myth of the eternal return, for she tells

Leroy: “‘we have started over again [...]. And this is how it turned out’” (113). Norma

Jean clearly rejects Mabel’s fantasy. Indeed, rather than effect a re-union, Norma Jean

takes the trip to get away from Leroy, Mabel, and the idea of conceiving another child.


58

12 Rather than bring Mabel’s fantasy to fruition, then–a re-union of a normative family

and the restitution of the wholeness and sufficiency of her subjectivity–the trip to

Shiloh effects just the opposite. The normative family disintegrates completely and

thus loses its function as the mise-en-scène of Mabel’s desire. In addition, with the

family’s disintegration, Mabel loses her positionality within the dominant fiction.

Ironically, even though Mabel wields power by playing the “man” and by appropriating

the phallus, her fantasy about Shiloh becomes the vehicle by means of which she

executes her own figurative self-immolation. Rather than restore her sense of power,

privilege, and presence within the family–and thus providing her with a sense of unity

and wholeness--the trip to Shiloh effects her psychic castration and her absence within

the symbolic order. At the end of the trip to Shiloh and at the end of the story–which

are both her trip and her story--Mabel remains a desiring subject–and a subject of

desire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bucher, Tina. “Changing Roles and Finding Stability: Women in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and

Other Stories.” Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association (1991):

50-55.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason. Hopewell, New Jersey: The

Ecco Press, 1998.

Morphew. G. O. “Downhomme Feminists in Shiloh and Other Stories.” Southern Literary Journal

(1989): 41-49.

Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. London: Routlege, 1992.

—. The Subject of Semiotics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

White, Leslie. “The Function of Popular Culture in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories and

In Country.” The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South (1988): 69-79.

Wilhelm, Albert. “Private Rituals: Coping with Change in the Fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason”.

Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought (1987): 271-282.

NOTES

1. . See for example: Tina Bucher, “Changing Roles and Finding Stability: Women in Bobbie Ann

Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories”; G. O. Morphew, “Downhomme Feminists in Shiloh and Other

Stories”; Leslie White, “The Function of Popular Culture in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other

Stories and In Country”; and Albert Wilhelm, “Private Rituals: Coping with Change in the Fiction of

Bobbie Ann Mason.”

2. . If Mabel’s fantasy-fetish were to materialize, she would ironically seem to resume the

classically “feminine” position within the reconstructed normative family–that of the doting

grandmother. However, since Mabel, in each of the three previous family structures, has


59

unilaterally and imperialistically wielded the phallus to ensure her power, privilege, and

wholeness, we can only imagine that she would carry the pattern into the fourth family structure

as well, for her fantasy-fetish defines her subjectivity and her positionality; they are the elements

that constitute her desire and identification.

ABSTRACTS

C’est en considérant le concept de “la politique libidinale,” établi par Kaja Silverman, que le

Professeur Bentley démontre comment quatre structures familiales developpées par Bobbie Ann

Mason dans “Shiloh” se conforment ou s’éloignent du modèle d’une famille normative. A

première vue, l’histoire se concentre sur le voyage de Norma Jean et de Leroy au mémorial de la

Guerre de Secession du même nom afin de raviver leur mariage et leur vie familale. Ce voyage,

toutefois, n’est en fait qu’une manifestation physique d’un voyage psychologique bien plus

important : c’est la vision de Mabel–son retour imaginaire à Shiloh. En d’autres termes, Mabel

désire que Norma Jean et Leroy se rendent à Shiloh parce que leur voyage est l’incarnation de son

propre retour imaginaire en cet endroit. Cette vision, en fait, représente non seulement l’unité de

la famille telle qu’elle la conçoit, mais c’est aussi une vision qui exprime sa propre unité et sa

compétence–la puissance et le privilège de réaliser sa conscience subjective


60

Writing Between ‘Self’ and ‘Nation’:Nationalism, (Wo)manhood andModernity in Bessie Head’s TheCollector of Treasures and OtherBotswana Village Tales

Kwadwo Osei‑Nyame Jnr

[O]ne speaks as a woman, although the subject

‘woman’ is not a monolithic essence defined once

and for all but rather the site of multiple,

complex, and potentially contradictory sets of

experiences, defined by overlapping variables

such as class, race, age, lifestyle, sexual

preference, and others. One speaks as a woman in

order to empower women, to activate socio-

symbolic changes in their condition: this is a

radically anti-essentialist position.1

—Rosi Braidotti

I have always been just me, with no frame of

reference outside to anything beyond myself.2

—Bessie Head.

1 Writing in “Notes From A Quiet Backwater”, the essay that opens her polemical

autobiographical narrative, A Woman Alone, the Botswanan and South African writer

Bessie Head observes that:

There must be many people like me in South Africa whose birth or beginnings are

filled with calamity and disaster, the story of person who is the skeleton in the

cupboard or the dark and fearful secret swept under the carpet. The circumstances

of my birth seemed to make it necessary to obliterate all traces of a family history.

(A Woman Alone, 3).


61

2 I shall argue in this essay that despite her statement above, Head, when she decided to

transform her politicised consciousness into creative writing, was not in the least

constrained by the fact that she was a Coloured and hence an Othered South African.

Caroline Rooney is correct to argue in this respect that while Head brings to her work

“concerns that might refer back to” apartheid South African society, “she always

endeavours to move “away from the enclosures of that world.”3

3 I shall examine some of the stories in The Collector of Treasures to demonstrate the

extent to which Head saw herself as very much a part of Botswanan society. Head not

only wrote at length and in detail on Africa’s relationship to Western modernity, but

also at a local level examined the social arrangements and relationships between

Botswanan men and women. What is more, although writing specifically from the

position of a woman, Head spoke for, and on behalf of Africans generally. In the title

story “The Collector of Treasures,” for example Head, contends that

The ancestors made so many errors and one of the most bitter-making things was

that they delegated to men a superior position in the tribe, while women were

regarded, in a congenital sense, as being an inferior form of life. To this day women

still suffer from all the calamities that befall an inferior form of human life.4

4 While speaking here specifically of Botswanan society, the example Head provides

speaks to the situation in Africa generally. Head’s importance within the tradition of

African women’s writing in this respect compares only with that of such internally

renowned novelists as the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, the Nigerians Flora Nwapa and

Buchi Emecheta, and the Senegalese Mariama Bâ.5

5 Straddling the precarious spaces between South African and Botswanan national

identities, Head is the only one among the aforementioned writers to have suffered the

predicament of being totally rejected from her native home. In all her writing, which

includes such works as her very first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), the highly

acclaimed second novel Maru (1971), the controversial masterpiece A Question of Power

(1973), and even in her more recent posthumously published works as such Tales of

Tenderness and Power (1989), A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990), A Gesture of

Belonging (1991) and The Cardinals (1993), Head skilfully engages with the existential

anxieties embedded in the notions of ‘self’ and the ‘individual’ vis-à-vis the politics of

communal ideology and nationalism. This is commendable given particularly the fact

that Head was a social reject, who struggled early in her life to overcome her early

marginalisation from South African society. Exiled from South Africa in 1964, she

remained an illegal immigrant in her adopted Botswana until a whole decade and a half

later when she was granted citizenship. In one of the letters she wrote to her cherished

friend Randolph Vigne from Serowe, the Botswanan village in which she lived, Head

asserted:

I was just living here like the greatest hermit you can find. Such tremendous

pressure has built up against me in this little village and I shall get no help from the

police if my life is in danger… The authorities have made no bones about the fact

that they don’t want me here. I have been trying in every way to get out. They’re all

engaged from the Republic of South Africa. They’ve never stopped at showing me

what they think of me.6

6 As her biographer Gilian S. Eilersen asserts in a hyperbolic but not inaccurate

formulation, Head “seemed singularly alone in the world. As her success as a writer

brought her increasing renown, she began to admit quite openly that she had not

known relatives.”7


62

7 Despite her alienation and her lack of a proper sense of family or community, Head

herself recognised that her particular situation reflected a general problem within her

society.

8 Head often made definitive statements on Africa frequently both at the level of direct

personal intervention and through authorial interjection and the characterisation of

her women protagonists in particular. Although lonely and almost perennially

traumatized by the dominant discourses and ideologies of exclusion that South African

apartheid society epitomized, Head nevertheless discovered a sense of self-worth even

at a time when she was displaced from her adopted country Botswana. Head’s sense of

belonging and her African-ness have not been properly elaborated. Thus Elaine Savory

argues, for instance, that unlike other African writers “living in their natal societies

and in relatively secure family units connected to a strong community,” Head “always

knew herself to be an outsider, even after many years in Botswana.”8 The danger of

argument’s such as Savory’s is that they restrict the definition of what a community or

family means. In the particular case of Head, it has engendered a predetermined

individualism and permanent sense of alienation as the mode of identity that her life

and work best represents. We become less conscious of Head’s unwavering faith in a

philosophically affirmed identification with Africa. This is a sad state of affairs for a

woman who once described herself as a “great pan-Africanist.”9 Kumari Jayawardena

has argued in Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World that “feminism, like socialism,

has no particular ethnic identity”.10 Extrapolating from Jayawardena, we can argue that

Head’s communal awareness required no specific ethnic grounding. Head was not

rootless. As I shall demonstrate in the rest of the essay, as much as any other African

writer, Bessie Head belonged to, knew, and represented Africa.

9 Refusing to accept the conventional demarcations of space for women and men in

Botswanan society, Head examines the nature of social relationships in the story “Life”.

The narrative of “Life” concentrates on society’s perceptions of protagonist Life

Morapedi, who is projected as an outrageous young woman who returns to her village

after having “left… as a little girl of ten years old with her parents” (“Life,” 37). Upon

her return home, Life marries Lesego, described as a “king” (43) of his world, monarch

of all that he surveys, and a man who “liked women and had been so successful in that

sphere that he took his dominance and success for granted” (41).

10 One of the first things Life tells the group of village woman who congregate around her

to provide her with moral support is that “‘Money flows like water in Johannesburg ...

‘You just have to know how to get it’”(38). The villagers, generally “impressed with the

smartness” of Life, whom they consider a “city girl” (“Life”, 38) temper their

admiration of her generous character and their wonder at her display of material

wealth with irony and scepticism. Even as they enjoy the benefits of the things they

previously craved for, and which she now provides them, they proceed with “caution”,

arriving at the conclusion

among themselves that their child could not have lived a very good life in

Johannesburg. Thrift and honesty were the dominant themes of village life and

everyone knew that one could not be honest and rich at the same time; they

counted every penny and knew how they had acquired it—with hard work. They

never imagined money to be a bottomless pit without end; it always had an end and

was hard to come by in this dry, semi-desert land. They predicted that she would

soon settle down—intelligent girls got jobs in the post office sooner or later. (38-39)


63

11 However, Life’s character is shown to transgress the fixity of gender identities in her

village. As the narrative informs us further about Life’s experiences in South Africa,

she

had had the sort of varied career that a city like Johannesburg offered a lot of black

women. She had been a singer, beauty queen, advertising model, and prostitute.

None of these careers were available in the village—for the illiterate women there

was farming and housework; for the literate, teaching, nursing, and clerical work.

(“Life“, 39)

12 Head is not interested here in any simple polarisations of the moral versus the immoral

as far as African womanhood is concerned. Instead, the story and Life’s putatively

amoral character is an analytical lens through which Head engages with specific

features of so-called African modernity and modernization. The critique of modernity

is codified in the story as a phenomenon that “disrupted” the “village life” of a mainly

rural” pre-independent Botswanan “country” (37). Groups of migrant workers are also

described as bringing back from South Africa with them “bits and bits of a foreign

culture and city habits they had absorbed” (37).

13 Although “the intensely conservative hard core centre of village life” (“Life”, 39) made

up of farmers and housewives shun Life when she begins to sleep indiscriminately with

the men in the village, Head is more interested in representing how colonialism, rural-

urban transitions, and the general expansion of economic activity in African towns

gave free rein to a consumer culture informed by the logic of capitalist development.

This is reflected particularly in the fact that the capitalist ethos of urban areas like the

South African city of Johannesburg are shown to be spreading slowly but surely within

Life’s rural village. As the narrator informs us:

The men were paying for her [Life’s] services. People’s attitude to sex was broad

and generous—it was recognised as a necessary part of human life, that it ought to

be available whenever possible like food and water, or else one’s life would be

extinguished or one would get dreadfully ill. To prevent these catastrophes from

happening, men and women generally had a lot of sex but on a respectable and

human level. (“Life”, 39).

14 Siniana, a male character in the story describes Life as “a terrible fuck-about” (“The

Collector“, 42). Before marrying Lesego, Life was a cheery, outgoing woman, who

frequented the local shebeens and went out with different men. After coaxing her into

marriage, Lesego warns her “‘If you go out with those men again, I’ll kill you’”, (43), a

promise that tragically he fulfils. Angela Carter, who includes “Life” in her comparative

anthology of short stories, Wayward Girls, contends that Life is

thought to be bad, even wicked, not because she distributes her sexual favours but

because she charges money for them, and, by doing so, disrupts the easy-going

harmony of her village and transforms its intimate relations into cash transactions.

She imports the twentieth century into the timeless African village and she is made

to suffer for it.11

15 My own argument is that Life’s apparently decadent behaviour can be seen also as a

quintessential act of transgression and a personalised, individual means of fighting the

patriarchal tendencies of her community. Apart from Radithobolo who is murdered by

Life’s husband Lesego for sleeping with his wife, the men who sleep with Life, and who

like her can be said to have decadent sexualities are generally left unpunished. They

are not censured by society, neither are they, like Life, described as being sexually

loose. It is women, then, who are Othered within the symbolic and totalising logic of a

modernity that creates urbanization in areas like Johannesburg and ensures the spread


64

of city life to the rural areas. Given that Life acquires her sexual experiences in

Johannesburg, Head intends her story to reflect the anxieties that modernity has

wrought on women. It is obvious that Head is contesting conventional assumptions

about women’s loose morality and their domesticity in the age of so-called modernity.

16 In presenting Life as a victim of the developmental logic of a male-dominated

modernity, Head is also demonstrating the extent to which, among other newly

acquired cultures of consumption and modes of indulgence, it is the desire by men for

sex and their need for instant physical gratification that engenders a conducive

atmosphere for Life to “make a business out of selling herself”. Thus, instead of

depicting Life as a whore, Head portrays unrestricted sexual desire on the part of men

as a sign of a counter-productive modernity that creates a culture of bodily

consumption. Life, or ‘Woman’ cannot therefore be simplistically criticised for an

inherently loose morality.12 As Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell have argued, “the

public/private dichotomy as a principle of social organization, and its ideological

articulation in various conceptions of reason and justice are detrimental to women”. At

the heart of this mode of organisation is what a host of feminist critics have described

variously as “a mystification of the gender-power relations that constitute the subtext

of the modern economy and the state”, a “repression of women’s difference and their

exclusion from the public”, a “resulting trivialization of women’s moral aspirations and

perspectives”, and the “the double bind between home and work resulting from this

dichotomy”.

17 In engaging with these aspects of African modernity and the changing positions of

women and men within Botswanan society, Head is taking a critical look at “the Tswana

way of life” (43). Botswana society is one in which men are generally permitted to be

more sociable and public, while women are domesticated and restricted to the home or

so-called women’s duties. It is in this respect that Lesego, the man who marries Life,

prefers “lounging around the village” (43), while restricting Life to a life of tedium in

the home.13 By presenting Life as someone who rebels against this arrangement,

Headproblematises the conventional distinctions in Botswanan society between the

public and private as they relate to the roles and identities of men and women because

she personally experienced the perils of the oppositional demarcations of space into

differentiated socio-cultural and political zones for women and men. Life refuses to be

a man’s Other within a patriarchally ordered system. Writing in a 1950s Johannesburg

daily, Home Post, Head, by way of introduction to her readers revealed that as a child

she “wanted to know all about boxing and race horses and everything a girl shouldn’t

know about”.14

18 Rob Nixon points that there is a general “predominance of male urban experience” in

South(ern) African fiction which can be taken “to some degree” to be “a consequence of

the geography of apartheid, whereby disproportionately large numbers of women were

consigned to the impoverished Bantustans”.15 This situation, of course, occurred, as a

consequence of urbanization and exportation from the rural areas of Southern Africa of

black South African migrant labour.16 As a reporter in the Durban of the late 1950s,

Head experienced discrimination, as the following comments by both she herself and

her biographer Eilersen reveal:

It was in District Sixthat Bessie lived and was to work. She was the only woman

reporter. This meant that she was always being given stories connected with

women and children, ‘while the men reporters get murders and politics to do. One

day I [Bessie Head] should like to get hold of a good murder.’17


65

19 Lewis Nkosi argues that Head is “not a political novelist in any sense that we can

recognize.” Nkosi claims further, without, however providing any of the “ample

evidence” he contends exists, that Head was “generally hostile to politics”. In Nkosi’s

view, “this lack of precise political commitment weakens rather than aids” Head.18

Nkosi’s view suggests a fundamental misperception on his part of the relationship

between the private and the political, failing as he does to see that the personal can

also be political. His argument is thus predisposed towards what Julia Watson and

Sidonie Smith have described as the “totalising tendencies” of contemporary theories

on culture and society.19 It is ill advised to separate the private, the emotional, and the

psychological—in short, what are often ideologically consigned to a subordinate

“private-domestic” realm—from a putatively superior “public-political” culture.

20 While Kibera and Nkosi assume that Head’s personal relationships are far removed

from the larger political world of Botswana, it is really the case as my discussion of

Life’s character reveals, that private feelings and emotions also have histories and

therefore need to be historicized. Readings which consign activities in the domain of

the private—what Nkosi calls the close personal relationships, of love, value, and

humanity—to that of the irrational and the apolitical have become increasingly

untenable particularly in the wake of present-day critiques of the binarisms of the

private and the domestic in a variety of disciplines ranging from literature and

sociology through to history and political science.20 In the title story, “The Collector of

Treasures,” it is again the irrational sexual drives of Garesego Mokopi that serves as the

leitmotif for Head’s discussion of the politics of nationalism. Garesego’s relationship

with his wife Dikeledi becomes illustrative of an unfair relationship and the unequal

power relations between men and women within the Botswanan nation. Significantly,

Head links the oppression that women suffer in Botswanan society with the

consequences of national liberation and African independence, as Garesego Mokopi, the

husband of Dikeledi engages in a “dizzy kind of death dance of wild destruction and

dissipation” (“The Collector,” 92). As Garesego neglects his wife and his children, the

bodies of other women serve as a pleasure zone for him:

For four years prior to independence, he [Garesego] had worked as a clerk in the

district administration service, at a steady salary of R50.00 a month. Even during

his lean days he had a taste for womanising and drink; now he had the resources for

a real spree. He was not seen at his home again and lived and slept around the

village, from woman to woman. He left his wife and three sons—Banabothe, the

eldest, aged four; Inalame, aged three; and the youngest, Mostomi, aged one—to

their own resources. Perhaps he did so because she was the boring, semi-literate

traditional sort, and there were a lot of exciting new women around. Independence

produced marvels indeed. (“The Collector”, 92)

21 By showing how Garesego irresponsibly abandons his family, Head is demonstrating

the perils of an individualistic and egotistical approach to life. Here again, it is obvious

that Head’s humanistic approach to life gestures towards the preservation of family

values and bonding between couples. Head was herself a single mother, and thus

herself suffered in her own way if not in directly the same manner as Dilekedi and

other women did.

22 Head and her husband Harold Head are said to have quarrelled a lot, and Head would

sometimes rage at him in the presence of others. It was partly because their quarrels

got the better of them that Head left with her baby Howard to the British Protectorate

of Bechuanaland. Head’s pre-occupation with African family values is a dominant trope


66

in her fiction. In her historical and ethnographical portrait of the Bamangwato, a sub-

nation within Botswanaland, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, Head presents a similarly

unflattering image of an irresponsible African man, who is described as “ a gay, dizzy

character on a permanent round of drink and women, full of shoddy values and without

any sense of responsibility for the children he so haphazardly procreates”.21 As my own

discussion shows, Bamangwato and Botswanaland are interchangeable tropes of the

nation in Head’s fiction.

23 Head’s faith in familial bonding and marital values come into play here, and one is

reminded at this stage of the use that other African women writers have made of the

couple and the family as a trope for imagining the nation as a community in which men

and women are potentially equal partners. Towards the end of her narrative in So Long

a Letter, the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ writes, for instance,that

To love one another! If only each partner could move sincerely towards each

other!…The success of a family is born of the couple’s harmony as the harmony of

multiple instruments creates a pleasant symphony. The nation is made up of all the

families, rich or poor, united or separated, aware or unaware. The success of a

nation therefore depends inevitably on the family.22

24 However in Bâ’s novel, as in Head’s short story, men abdicate their function. Whereas

in So Long a Letter Modou Fall abandons his wife of old–Ramatoulaye–for a younger

woman–Binetou–and dissipates all the wealth that he and Ramatoulaye have acquired,

the level of profligacy on men’s part is even worse in “The Collector of Treasures”.

25 In terms of defining an African worldview, Head also drew upon lived experience to

stress the validity of Tswana custom and tradition. What comes across, for example, in

the following statement by Modise, the old man narrator of “Heaven is not Closed”, is a

self-conscious dissemination of knowledge about the complicated nature of Botswana’s

transition into the new world order that is often described as Western modernity:

I [Modise]never was like Raloke, an unbeliever. But the man, my brother, draws out

my heart. He liked to say that we as a tribe would fall into great difficulties if we

forget our customs and laws. Today, his words seem true. There is thieving and

adultery going on such as was not possible under Setswana law. (“Heaven“, 8; emphasis

added)

26 Head is describing here the conflictual nature of Africa’s encounter with Western

modernity. On the one hand, for instance, the modernity of Christian morality

promises its believers and subjects development and civilisation. On the other hand,

the increase of immoral acts with the introduction of a new culture of Christianity

stands in contradiction to the civilising and moralising discourses of Christianity. This

becomes clear as Modise continues his story in “Heaven is not Closed”:

In the days when they were young, said the old man Modise, it had become the

fashion for all black peoples to embrace the Gospel. For some it was the mark of

whether they were ‘civilised’ or not. For some, like Galethebege, it was their whole

life. Anyone with eyes to see would have known that Galethebege had been born

good; under any custom, whether Setswana custom or Christian custom, she would

still have been good. It was this natural goodness of heart that made her so eagerly

pursue the Gospel (“Heaven”, 8)

27 The expression ”natural goodness of heart” is important because it encapsulates Head’s

own philosophical humanism and her general approach to life. As Savory has argued,

“the hardships that Head suffered, such as her ill health, sense of displacement,

poverty, and isolation, seemed to shape her writing in important ways”.23 “Heaven is

not Closed” is also Head’s own account of Africa’s transition to a new modern world


67

order and the complicated nature of that transition. Christianity, which was central to

the European ‘civilising mission’ in Africa is shown to have been embraced by many

simply because it was a practice that was in-vogue.

28 Head’s argument is meant to counter the idea that modernity was a movement from

barbarism into civilisation or from ignorance into self-knowledge. In contesting

ingrained assumptions about African identities, the narrative presents a critical

portrait of those who led the Christian European civilising mission into Africa. The

focus of analysis is the stereotyping of Africa and Africans in missionary discourse:

The missionary was a short anonymous-looking man who wore glasses. He had been

the resident missionary for some time, and like all his fellows he did not

particularly like the people. He always complained to his own kind that they were

terrible beggars and rather stupid. (“Heaven”, 10)

29 Head reveals, as Rosi Braidotti has argued, that certain aspects of European identity

represent a hegemonic mode of Othering that has

managed historically to perfect the trick that consists in passing itself off as the

norm, the desirable center, confining all ‘others’ to the position of periphery. It is

indeed quite a trick to combine universalistic aspirations with capital-intensive

efforts to establish cultural homologation of all peripheral ‘others’.24

30 The above passage must be read against the background of the fact that Head was a

product of South African apartheid politics, and an adopted child, who was sent at the

age of thirteen “to a severe mission orphanage for ‘coloured’ girls”, where she was

“abruptly told about her real mother and father, described respectively as ‘insane’ and

a ‘native’”. She was treated as if she too might be at risk of also becoming insane.”25

Eventually “cast out as mixed race and abandoned”, and forced to leave apartheid

South Africa for Botswana where she lived as refugee for 15 years, she engaged the

problems of racism and ethnocentrism at the same time as she sought ways in which to

negotiate herself out of the constricting ambience fostered by racialist and

ethnocentric attitudes.26

31 It is further instructive to note that by contesting colonial ideology, Head is speaking

on behalf of a broader African audience that has suffered from the debilitating

stereotypes of colonial discourse. While it has been suggested that Head “decided to opt

for ‘mankind as whole’”, and that “her black nationalist phase was ended” because she

felt rejected for “not being black enough”, her politicised consciousness always

retained a black or pan-Africanist nationalist disposition. Head speaks again in defence

of Africa in another passage from “Heaven is not Closed” where missionaries’ attitudes

are alarmingly reminiscent of stereotypes of Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness.

He [the missionary] stared at her with polite, professional interest. She was a

complete non-entity, a part of the vague black blur which was his congregation—

oh, they noticed chiefs and people like that, but not the silent mass of humble and

lowly who had an almost weird capacity to creep quietly through life. (“Heaven”,

10)

32 Rob Nixon has argued that Head’s “reliance on the village and the Southern African

region as complementary sites of affiliation” presented her with “spaces that offset her

estrangement from national and Pan-Africanist identities” in her fiction.27 This is

partially true. However, it is equally important to stress Head’s identification with Pan-

Africanist ideology in the instances in which she spoke for Africa generally by

contesting the negative stereotyping of its people.28 Savory has suggested in her short

biographical portrait of Head that


68

There is little in Head’s writing of a sense of community or connection to African

tradition… Head is unquestionably an African writer: she was born in South Africa

and wrote about Botswana. Her entire life was lived in Africa. But her sense of what

this means is idiosyncratic, understandably, given her personal history.29

33 While Savory herself observes that “[m]uch of Head’s writing was an effort to portray

the people... of Botswana” so that “Botswana, and particularly Serowe, where Head

finally settled… became for her a kind of moral microcosm of the world in which all

human traits were in play,” she is unable to come to terms with the fact that Head also

often affirmed her African identity in positive and progressive ways.30

34 There is no doubt that Head was to some extent an “outsider,” whose writing is rich

and deep for blending the life experiences, ideas and thoughts of different intellectual

and revolutionary figures. However, she was simultaneously deeply immersed in

theories on revolution in Africa. In typically exuberant language, Head idolized one of

her African heroes:

After reading George Padmore’s book [Pan-Africanism or Communism: The Coming

Struggle of Africa] my whole manner of speaking and thinking changed. It totally

unsuited me for living in such a climate and environment as South Africa. It gave

me a new skin and a new life that was totally unacceptable to conditions down

there… George Padmore is a prophet to me. Over and above that he was the

initiator, the liberator of Africa; he was too a kind of John the Baptist crying in the

wilderness—make ready the way… What else did the liberation of Africa mean to me

but this inner awakening and alertness—as though from some direction I may be

given a hint, a clue and eagerly pass on this small grain of truth to some other

seeker to question, examine and add his grain.31

35 Head may not seem to have belonged to the nation, even after many years in Botswana,

yet her politicised consciousness in relation to both Botswanan and South African

national tradition was pan-Africanist in its ideological disposition.

36 By deploying an interiorised form of narrative self-consciousness, Head projected

subversive female heroines within society as part of her revolutionary project of

political non-conformism. Her ideological project interrogates normative but dominant

modes of existence for women. The transgressive value of Head’s writing derives

therefore from its ability to challenge conventional modes of self-understanding.

Head’s characters become representative of that way of life that the critic Rosi

Braidotti has described as representing a nomadic form of subjectivity.

37 Braidotti contends in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary

Feminist Theory that “[t]hough the image of nomadic subjects is inspired by the

experience of peoples or cultures that are literally nomadic,” there is an alternative

form of nomadism that

refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded

modes of thought and behaviour. Not all nomads are world travellers; some of the

greatest trips can take place without physically moving from one’s habitat. It is the

subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of

travelling.32

38 Braidotti’s argument is of relevance to the ongoing debates on African identity politics

in which The Collector of Treasures participates. It is clear, for example, that part of the

ideological project of Life’s characterisation is to call into question Lesego’s conviction

that “he never really expected his dominance and authority to encounter any

challenge” (“The Collector”, 43).


69

39 It is important to add, however, in Head’s particular instance, that simultaneously as

she remained a nomad extraordinaire, she consistently affirmed through her fictional

protagonists her own knowledge of and identification with the social mores, traditions,

customs and norms of her adopted nation. Thus “Heaven is not Closed,” “Life,” and

“The Collector of Treasures” are stories that do not only delineate the nomadism of

Head’s aesthetic and ideological project and her critical meditations on the new world

order occasioned by the encounter between Africa and the West, these stories also

reiterate the specific nature of Head’s affiliation to Africa.

40 It has become trendy not only within African literary criticism, but within

contemporary literary theory and cultural studies as a whole to posit putatively fluid,

complex, dynamic, and liberated postmodernist or post-nationalist concepts,

constructs and modes of identification against supposedly, essentialist, parochial, self-

serving, and constraining ways of living that are inevitably defined as nationalist.

Head’s work belongs to neither of these discursive categories or modes of thinking

because her work reflects that fact that all ideologies or theories be they -posts, -isms,

etc, are inevitably made up of essences. Writing in a recognizable self-assured voice,

and demonstrating her self-awareness in relation to the complex culture, customs and

traditions of the Bamagwanto people among whom she lived in Botswana, Head asserts

in her ethnographic novel, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind that:

It was by chance that I came to live in this village. I have lived most of life in

shattered little bits. Somehow, here, the shattered bits began to grow together.

There is a sense of wovenness, a wholeness in life here; a feeling of how strange and

beautiful people can be—just living.33

41 Braidotti describes a “notion of corporeal materiality” that emphasizes “the embodied

and therefore sexually differentiated structure of the speaking subject.”34 She is

concerned particularly with “feminist redefinitions of subjectivity” and the extent to

which these constitute “a new form of materialism” and a “rethinking” of “the bodily

roots of subjectivity” as the starting point for the epistemological project of

nomadism.”35 This way of seeing and doing was the very essence of Head’s life and

work. She was a woman who in her own words, lived with and accommodated both the

“shattered little bits” and the “sense of wovenness” and “wholeness.” Precisely because

of this, her writing, as Randolph Vigne among others has noted, was ultimately ‘a

gesture of belonging.’36 A lesson for postmodernism?

NOTES

1. . Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist

Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 3-4; original emphasis.

2. . Bessie Head, A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings, Craig MacKenzie ed., (Oxford:

Heinemann, 1990), p. 3. Subsequent references abbreviated A Woman Alone, are incorporated into

the text. See also, Head’s statement “I have also just been myself and there’s nothing so

wonderful in that,” Randolph Vigne ed. A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965-1979

(London; Heinemann, 1991), p. 9.


70

3. . Caroline Rooney argues in “Are We in the Company of Feminists?: A Preface for Bessie Head

and Ama Ata Aidoo”, Harriet D. Jump ed., Diverse Voices: Essays on Twentieth-Century Women Writers

in English (New York: Harvester, 1991), p. 217.

4. . Bessie Head, The Collector of Treasures (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 92. Subsequent

references abbreviated as “The Collector”, and to other individual stories are incorporated into

the text.

5. . For representative samples of the work of these writers, see Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here,

Nwapa’s Efuru, Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, and Bâ's So Long a Letter.

6. . Vigne, A Gesture of Belonging, p. 9.

7. . Gilian Stead Eilersen, Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann;

London; James Currey; Cape Town & Johannesburg, David Philip, 1995), p. 3.

Other critics have discussed Head’s solitude. Her fellow South African Lewis Nkosi describes her

as “an intelligent”, but “intensely lonely individual, worrying about the problems of belonging,

of close personal relationships, of love, value, and humanity.” See Lewis Nkosi, Tasks and Masks: Themes

and Styles of African Literature (London: Longman, 1981), p. 99.

8. . Elaine Savory, “Bessie Head (1937-1986)”, Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne eds,

Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (London: Fitzfroy Dearbon, 1998), pp.

206 - 220, p. 209.

9. . See Head’s letter to Vigne, A Gesture of Belonging, p. 13.

10. . See the Preface of Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London:

Zed Books, 1986).

11. . Angela Carter, “Introduction”, Angela Carter ed., Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An

Anthology of Short Stories London: Virago, 1986), pp. IX-XII, p. xi. Wayward Girls includes narratives

by other postcolonial writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and Ama Ata Aidoo.

12. . Angela Carter makes this point with telling effect with the following statement on the

identity of the female protagonists, heroines and adventuresses in her collection:

these stories would… seem much, much worse if men had invented them. They would be predatory, drunken

hags, confidence tricksters; monstrously precocious children; liars and cheats; promiscuous heartbreakers.

As it is, they are all presented as if they were perfectly normal. On the whole, women writers are kind to

women.

Carter, “Introduction,” Wayward Girls, p. ix

13. . Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, “Introduction: Beyond the Politics of Gender,” Seyla

Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell eds, Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender In Late-

Capitalist Societies (London: Polity Press, 1987), pp. 1-15, p. 9

14. . Cited in Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 42.

15. . Rob Nixon, “Rural Transnationalism: Bessie Head’s Southern Spaces,” Kate Darian Smith, Liz

Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall eds, Text, Theory, Space Land, Literature and History in South Africa and

Australia, (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 251.

16. . Head herself argues in “The Collector of Treasures” that colonialism was largely to blame for

this state of affairs:

The colonial era and period of migratory mining labour to South Africa… broke the old, traditional form of

family life and for long periods a man was separated from his wife and children while he worked for a

pittance in another land to raise the money to pay his British Colonial poll-tax. British Colonialism scarcely

enriched his life. He then became the ‘boy’ of the white man and a machine-tool of the South African mines.

(“The Collector“, p. 92).

17. . Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 39.

18. . Lewis Nkosi, Tasks and Masks: themes and Styles of African Literature (London: Longman, 1981),

p. 99; emphases added.

19. . Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, “Introduction: De/colonization and the Politics of

Discourse in Women’s Historical Practices“, Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith eds, De/Colonizing the


71

Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1992), pp. XII-XXXI, p. XVI.

20. . See the essays by Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, and Jane Markus in Benhabib and Cornell

eds, Feminism as Critique.

21. . Bessie Head, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 60.

22. . Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter; A Novel, Trans from the French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas

(London: Virago, 1982), p. 89.

23. . Savory, “Bessie Head (1937-1986)”, p. 209.

24. . Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 3.



27. . Nixon, “Rural Transnationalism”, p. 244

28. . Aware of her multiple location as a subject, Head distinguishes different but complementary

senses of self in A Woman Alone when she asserts that: “I have my national, my African side but I

am also very much an international kind of person”, A Woman Alone, p. 95.

29. . Savory, “Bessie Head (1937-1986)”, pp. 208, 209.

30. . Savory, “Bessie Head (1937-1986)”, pp.. 206 - 220, p. 209.

31. . Cited in Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 45.


33. . Bessie Head, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind p. x


35. . Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, pp. 3-4; original emphasis.

36. . See Vigne’s comments in A Gesture of Belonging, p. vi on why he chooses that title for Head’s

collection of letters.

ABSTRACTS

Le présent article étudie trois nouvelles du recueil Collector of Treasures de Bessie Head, née en

Afrique du Sud et immigrée au Bostwana où elle a fait carrière d'écrivain. Hommes et femmes, les

personnages de son oeuvre illustrent la relation qui existe entre traditions africaines et

modernité

AUTHORS

KWADWO OSEI‑NYAME JNR

Kwadwo Osei-Nyame Jnr, has a D.Phil in African Literature from the University of Oxford, and

lectures in African Literature and Cultural Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London. He has published a number of articles on African literature in such journals

as Ariel, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Current Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature,

Kunapipi and Research in African Literatures.


72

Identity in the Short Story Cycles ofLorrie Moore

Karen Weekes

When I was a child, I tried hard for a time to split

my voice. I wanted to make chords, to splinter my

throat into harmonies–floreted as a field, which

is how I saw it... With concentration and a

muscular push of air, I felt, I might be able to

people myself, unleash the crowd in my voice

box, give birth, set free all the moods and

nuances, all the lovely and mystical inhabitants

of my mind’s speech.

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

1 As became increasingly evident in the 1960s and beyond, female identity is fraught with

conflicting role choices and continuing pressure to fulfill social expectations despite

increased career demands. The resultant fracturing of identity and existential angst is

reflected in short story cycles written by quite a few women in the last forty years.

Although this genre dates back to the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, its use is

especially appropriate for contemporary women authors as they sort through the roles

available to their female protagonists and try to piece together a unified sense of self

for them. Lorrie Moore is one of a group of writers, including Alice Munro, Jamaica

Kincaid, Harriet Doerr, Denise Chávez, Ellen Gilchrist, Maxine Hong Kingston, and

Sandra Cisneros, who have used the form in this way. Although the point of view varies,

fictional narratives by these authors consistently feature one contemporary female’s

perspective. Each story illuminates a specific aspect of the protagonist or a particular

role that is available to her; she integrates these elements as she works to create an

empowering, authentic existence. Just as the short story cycle is greater than the sum

of its parts, these protagonists’ lives are richer than is reflected in any of the tales

taken individually.

2 The short story cycle lets an author emphasize different aspects of a character’s

personality or present various formative experiences that gain resonance by their


73

juxtaposition with each other, eventually resulting in a three-dimensional portrait. Rita

Felski points out the relevance of fluid texts such as these to “the fragmented and

incoherent workings of the unconscious”. In her book The Gender of Modernity (1995),

she describes the characteristics of Modernism in terms that are equally applicable to

many contemporary short story cycles, citing its “disruption of hierarchical syntax and

of linear time and plot, its decentering of the knowing and rational subject, [and] its

fascination with the aural and rhythmic qualities of language” (26). All of these traits

appear in late twentieth-century texts by the previously listed authors and are

exemplified in those by Lorrie Moore. Felski identifies these elements as part of a

“feminine aesthetic” (26), and Moore’s use of them develops a complex, multi-faceted

female identity.

3 As Sandra Bartky writes in Femininity and Domination (1990), “Each of us is in pursuit of

an inner integration and unity, a sense that the various aspects of the self form a

harmonious whole” (51). For women, this integration is especially and increasingly

difficult to achieve. Many changes in the last half of the 1900s have directly affected

contemporary females’ lives: a huge increase in the number and type of vocations

available, a freedom from biological reproductive mandates and their dependencies,

longer and healthier life-spans, and, most importantly, a new respect for their

potential and contributions. All of these improvements bring with them their own

responsibilities and demands, and women now must create identities that integrate a

number of possibilities and roles that were unthinkable a century ago. And throughout

the arduous and painful process of shaping an identity based on a personal conception

of what each woman believes her life should be, she must resist persistent messages

that still encourage her to live for and through others rather than developing her own

autonomous self.

4 Although Felski champions a feminine aesthetic at work in the Modernist period, the

flexibility and emphasis on experimentation that are two of the hallmarks of

Postmodern art have produced an environment that encourages participation by

females and representations of their own experiences. Fittingly, this has occurred

within a fractured social context that is epitomized by the short story cycle. The

structure of these cycles replicates the complex structure of women’s identities: it

reflects attempts to connect fragments in a meaningful way, to create a fulfilling and

unified self.

5 Lorrie Moore has written six books, five of which are intended for adults: three

collections of short stories and two novels. However, two of these “collections” and one

of the works usually considered novels are actually short story cycles: her first book,

Self-Help, published in 1985; Anagrams, published in 1986; and Birds of America, her

acclaimed text of 1998. The individual pieces in these works are united in a variety of

ways, but one of their most salient commonalities is the quest for identity. Her

protagonists, often women in their thirties or early forties, are haunted by a sense of

being an outsider; they are exiles both in terms of place and in terms of emotional and

artistic sensibility. These characters attempt to overcome this isolation by making

connections with lovers or family and by reassessing the life-choices that they have

made.

6 In order to form a more satisfying identity, protagonists in Moore’s short story cycles

are constantly exploring and pushing against the social boundaries that they and

others have established. Her characters are often at odds with the roles in which they


74

find themselves and with the expectations of families and spouse; they are

uncomfortable even with their names, the most obvious marker of their identities. In

Birds of America, one protagonist, Olena, resists the efforts of her Romanian parents to

Americanize her name to “Nell,” but it is only after her parents have died that she

realizes that her legal name is an anagram of the word “alone,” emblematizing the role

of outcast that her ethnic heritage creates for her. Olena’s tale, “Community Life,” is

illustrative of most of Moore’s work: it is the narrative of a woman ill-at-ease in her

world, searching for a place in a “community” from which she feels physically,

emotionally, or creatively exiled.

7 Self-Help both leads the reader into this quagmire of the dislocated self and ostensibly,

through its very structure, guides her back out again. Many of its stories are written in

the form of a pop-psychology self-help manual, using the imperative voice. This

narrative structure exemplifies Judith Gardiner’s emphasis on the “processual nature

of female identity,” as it offers instructions on the continuing development and

reformulation of the self. Its second-person narration also blurs the line between

reader and protagonists and manipulates the “identifications between narrator,

author, and reader and the representation of memory,” as many female-authored texts

do (181). Moore advises on “How to be an Other Woman,” “How to Talk to Your

Mother,” “How to Become a Writer,” and even simply “How,” a title that leaves the

focus of its advice open. The similarity of protagonists’ situations in Self-Help is one of

the chief linking features of this cycle, as Michiko Kakutani notes:

While the heroines or narrators of each of the stories in Self-Help have different

names, they might well be the same woman–a smart, fairly hip young woman, so

bland in looks that she is always being mistaken by others for their sister... At once

insecure and terminally self-absorbed, she is someone who must filter everything

through the lens of her own ego... (Review 21)

8 The stories are, for the most part, linked by narrative structure and this similar main

character, but they are even more clearly united by thematic parallels. These tales

explore women’s various avenues for fulfillment, including work, motherhood,

daughterhood, sex, intimacy, and language.

9 In the first story, “How to Be an Other Woman,” the protagonist is “technically... still a

secretary for Karma-Kola,” but she wonders repeatedly who she is as she becomes

enmeshed in an affair with a married man: “Who is this? Who am I? ... Reclaim yourself.

Pieces have fluttered away” (13), and ultimately in this deceptive role one has to

“Wonder if you are getting old, desperate. Believe that you have really turned into

another woman” (17). But despite the despair at her betraying lover’s ultimate betrayal

of herself as well, this character uses wordplay as a means of survival, the pun in

“another” (meaning a different woman) and “an other” woman (meaning an adulterer)

being the most obvious. Being the “other” woman, an adulterer, has consumed her

identity to the extent that she is becoming another person altogether.

10 “Go Like This,” one of the few first-person narrated tales in the cycle, is built around

the various meanings of the title phrase: it appears eleven times in the fourteen-page

story, each time with a slightly different meaning. Although the narrator seems

unaware of this repetition as a manifestation of her subconscious fears about dying, she

consciously uses puns to keep her feelings at bay (if she dies at 43, she can die in her

“prime”), and only rarely do her emotions and her devastated sense of self become

explicit: “I am something putrid... I am something incorrect... Something uncouth”

(75). Solace is not to be found in her husband, who is already eyeing her friend as a


75

potential lover; her friends, who are eyeing her husband; her daughter, who needs to

be sheltered from her mother’s deterioration and death; or her work, which she can no

longer complete. The only power she, and most of Moore’s characters, wield is over

imagination and words.

11 Much writing by Moore emphasizes the importance of language to help characters

escape or “resist those forces which we feel every day” (Malin 196). Especially in this

first collection, however, words are an ineffective screen against the disappointments

of their lives, as Jay McInerney points out: “The women in these stories... are witty and

intelligent, addicted to wordplay and other forms of verbal self-defense, but they know

their wit and intelligence can’t save them from love, loss of love, death” (32). Ironically,

the wordplay that serves as a defense against emotional vulnerability additionally

serves as a distancing device to ensure that the character remains not only emotionally

unscathed, but also as emotionally untouched as possible.

12 Birds of America breaks new ground for Moore by showing the struggles of men as well

as of middle-aged women. However, ten of the twelve stories feature females who are,

once again, seeking connection, peace, and a sense of self, and they have often

“migrated” to other environments in their quest. Many of these women are artists, and

almost all find themselves in the Midwest at some significant point in their lives. In the

initial seven stories the cycle becomes most unified, as tale after tale features a similar

protagonist: a middle-aged female, transplanted to the Midwest, involved in a

disappointing relationship, with a life devoted to the arts and a fearful emptiness at her

core. “She was unequal to anyone’s wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its

loneliness shamed her like a crime” (17), realizes the main character in the initial story.

13 These women, past their physical prime for dancing or acting, or embarrassed by their

childlessness and solitary natures, never choose to become involved with a partner, but

somehow they drift into relationships with absolutely incompatible men. Penny Perrick

notes that

Moore has always written about people who are dangerously adrift in spite of, or

perhaps because of, being romantically attached and/or married. Her men and

women cannot stop fighting each other–mainly by means of stinging repartee–even

though there is a good chance that these sex wars will lead to ever increasing

loneliness, a state to be feared even more than an unsuitable coupling. You would

have to be looking for a long time before you found a Moore protagonist who

consciously sought out a suitable coupling. (22)

14 Surrendering to a startlingly deep need for connection, these women find themselves

becoming increasingly invisible, agoraphobic, and dislocated as a result of their mates’

infidelities and lack of comprehension. They seek solace in language, as Moore’s

characters usually do. They are witty, and, as usual, puns abound (“Marriage... it’s an

institution, all right.” [286]); however, language cannot save them.

15 Although Moore did not compose Birds of America as a short story cycle, she herself

recognizes the commonalities of this collection:

... these are stories about individuals in transition, in flux, ordinary people

confronting extraordinary circumstances in some way... these were not specifically

designed to have things in common, they were each individually generated and

imagined, although when you bring together a collection of stories that have been

written over an eight-year period, inevitably they end up with certain linking

features. (Merritt 13)


76

16 Despite the disparity in some of the stories’ settings, one reviewer notes the similar

dysfunctionalities of characters in the collection: “... they are all afflicted with ennui,

angst, and aimlessness. They can’t communicate or connect; they have no inner

resources; they can’t focus; they can’t feel love” (Rev. 207). This cycle is unified by the

repetition of this character type and of several central motifs, including the importance

of speech and language, an emphasis on art and artistry, questions of identity, various

types of acting, and, most obviously, birds.

17 As Moore reminds us, Audubon shot the birds that later are so authentically

represented in his Birds of America, making this title appropriate for these stories of

death, loss, and displacement. Many of these protagonists are in transit:

The spiritual and physical transience of her characters helps account for the book’s

Audubonish title: most of them exhibit some form of avian behavior, however

discrete and illusory–looping, migrating, soaring, disappearing on the horizon.

[Says Moore,] “I realized, when I was writing the last couple of stories, that this bird

imagery was just running through the book. ... To some extent, unrest and

searching always make for a good story.” (Blades 31)

18 Moore is also interested in “Audubon’s killing of the birds he painted” as “a symbol of

the creative process” (Gaffney 71), which would explain the presence in this book of

artists whose loss is greater than their gains, whose successes do not fully offset the

creators’ emptiness and angst.

19 Another of the unifying features of this book, according to Moore, is the “registration

of a peculiarly American sense of exile–geographic and emotional,” creating a kind of

“de facto American portrait” (Merritt 13) of contemporary females, especially, who are

exiled in the Midwest, the heartland of the country, and find there little solace or

understanding besides that which they can muster from their own linguistic and

emotional store. “Perhaps,” one of her characters thinks, “that was where affection

began: in an unlikely phrase, in a moment of someone’s having unexpectedly but at last

said the right thing” (88). Moore’s usual protagonists, quintessential mid-life women,

rely on language to make them whole, but the “right thing” to say is difficult for them

to find and even more difficult for them to communicate.

20 Self-Help, Birds of America, and Anagrams all feature a contemporary woman’s

perspective and present a multiplicity of roles facing women, but Anagrams especially

manipulates the real and imaginary roles that the protagonist and other characters

assume in a search for a cohesive sense of self and deals most directly with the creation

of identity. Dawn Ann Drzal comments on the “choices” that Moore’s previous

protagonists have in Self-Help:

These stories seem to present their heroines with a variety of options, but they zero

in to invalidate all but the chosen one. The large wheel of life is turning and within

it the small cog of the heroine’s psyche. No matter how many ways she turns a

phrase, no matter how many points of view she assumes, she can make only one

choice, but that doesn’t mean she’ll feel it was the right one, or even the only one.

No, she is doomed to be both determined and doubt-ridden. (506)

21 Moore’s narrative form in Anagrams confronts this problem of limited choice directly,

letting the main character, Benna Carpenter, live out the consequences of various

decisions about her life path. Its unique structure reflects Benna’s fractured self, which

we follow through a series of metamorphoses.

22 The book is divided into five sections: four short stories (ranging in length from 4 to 30

pages) and a novella (164 pages). Each section features three continuing characters:


77

Benna Carpenter, Gerard Maines, and Eleanor. But the essence of their continuity

transcends the flux of their varying situations and relationships to each other: In the

first story, “Escape from the Invasion of the Love-Killers,” Benna is a widowed

nightclub singer, Gerard is her neighbor, smitten with unrequited love for her, and

Eleanor is a friend of Benna’s who has a child. In the fourth story, “Water,” Benna is a

single art history professor, a respected scholar on Mary Cassatt; Gerard is her teaching

assistant, juggling the responsibilities of a wife, daughter, and graduate school; and

Eleanor is an absent friend to whom Benna writes long letters. In the novella, “The Nun

of That,” Benna is a widowed mother of an imaginary six-year old and is an ABD poetry

teacher at a community college; Gerard is her friend, a musician and aspiring opera

singer; and Eleanor is another figment of Benna’s imagination: an acerbic, overweight,

childless woman who teaches physical education between cigarette breaks. Moore says

that in choosing this structure, she was “inspired by the idea of an anagram... which is

the rearrangement of characters to make a new word. What I did was rearrange

characters to make new worlds” (Iannone 61). She has also likened the form to “a

Calder mobile, with the main narrative sprouting these little reworkings” (Gaffney 63).

Both the characters and themes are rearranged in various patterns, but certain

consistencies begin to be apparent throughout the collection.

23 Appropriately, one of the epigraphs for the novella is taken from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in

Wonderland: “‘Things flow about so here!’ she said at last in a plaintive tone, after she

had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked sometimes

like a doll and sometimes like a workbox, and was always in the shelf next above the

one she was looking at” (61). This “large bright thing,” shifting from a childhood doll to

the workbox of adulthood, is a perfect image for the cyclical and fluid nature of female

identity posited by Nancy Chodorow and by Gardiner, who “picture[s] female identity

as typically less fixed, less unitary, and more flexible than male individuality” (183).

Rather than a linear progress toward autonomy and independence, they argue that

females’ identities are continually formed and reformed, allowing women to fluctuate

between stages of development in response to the sociological demands of

relationships and maternal nurturing.

24 The consistency in both Alice in Wonderland and Anagrams is this quest: the ongoing

struggle on the part of the protagonist to try to make sense of experience, her longing

for meaningful and permanent connections with others, and her continuing pursuit of

an understanding of herself. In each story, Benna’s personality remains basically

unchanged: she is frightened of intimacy; self-doubting; uncertain of what her future

will be, can be, or even should be; searching for fulfillment in her work and her

relationships; and fighting off existential despair and excruciating loneliness. As she

says at the beginning of the novella, “You might one day wake up and find yourself

teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might

say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will

disappoint you” (63).

25 A significant characteristic of Benna’s that remains constant throughout the stories is

her use of puns and other types of wordplay, a trait redolent of Felski’s “fascination

with the aural... qualities of language” in the feminine aesthetic (26). As in Self-Help and

Birds of America, this linguistic tic is a coping mechanism that actually subverts any real

connection with other characters. Kakutani comments on Benna’s lack of participation

in “anything approaching a real conversation,” terming her reliance on wit and joking


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a “defense strategy that precludes the very intimacy she thinks she wants” (“Jokers”

13). “Strings Too Short to Use” is the story in which Benna is most painfully isolated, as

her lover drifts away in the midst of her pregnancy and breast lump traumas. Yet when

Eleanor painfully reveals her affair with Benna’s boyfriend, the stricken Benna’s only

spoken reaction is to make a pun on “sociobiology.” Throughout each incarnation,

Benna remains locked in her pattern of avoidance, even concerning her feelings for her

dearest friend, as she realizes that “I want here to be able to tell Gerard how it is that I

care for him. But I remain still, like someone being mugged” (203).

26 Another consistent theme is that of motherhood and Benna’s evolving response to that

role. She initially is “a woman who said she had no desire to have children... ‘Once

you’ve seen a child born you realize a baby’s not much more than a reconstituted ham

and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you’ve been eating for nine

months’” (6-7). In the second story, Benna is advised by a nurse-practitioner that if she

“had a child, it might straighten out [her] internal machinery a bit... A woman’s body is

so busy preparing to make babies that every year that goes by without one is another

year of rejection that is harder and harder for it to recover from. Soon it could go

completely crazy” (21). Benna pragmatically suspects that “it was talk like this that had

gotten women out of the factories and started immediately on the baby boom” (21).

Later, she accidentally gets pregnant by her insensitive and philandering boyfriend

(Gerard) and has an abortion. But in the novella, Benna is devoted to her daughter,

Georgianne, who is funny, loving, interesting, perfect–and imaginary.

27 The role of imagination is central to an understanding of both Benna and the book.

Near the end of the novella, Benna reveals that much of significance in her life has been

make-believe, and hints that the stories that have come before are alternative lives that

Benna has imagined: “I think, This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she

dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will

just sit there like a bunch of schoolkids with their hands raised and uncalled on–each

knowing, really knowing, the answer” (225).

28 Of all of Benna’s possibilities, her most satisfying role is her imaginary motherhood,

where she is able to love and be loved unstintingly, be intimate, creative, and active.

Benna’s motherhood is ideal and idealized in several ways: first, it contributes to her

sense of her own normalcy and sanity. Throughout the book, she anguishes over

whether or not she is crazy or will go crazy; at one point, she admits that “only once,

and very late at night, did I run downstairs and out into the street with my pajamas on,

gasping and watering, waiting for something–a car? an angel?–to come rescue or kill

me, but there was nothing, only streetlights and a cat” (23). Moore begins the novella,

“In the dictionary, lumpy jaw comes just before lunacy, but in life there are no such

clues” (63). As the nurse has cautioned, a childless female “could go completely crazy”

(21). In one sense, then, Benna’s creation of Georgianne allows her to adopt women’s

most traditionally acceptable role. The next peculiarity of Benna’s imaginary

motherhood is that, of course, Georgianne is always GOOD, and the ramifications of

child-rearing mistakes are non-existent. Thus Benna can be a parent without suffering

any consequences or inconveniences; she does not have to stop her career, make

divisive choices–she does not even have to give birth. She escapes the pain and

difficulties of motherhood, but savors the intimacy with and dependence of her child.

29 In contrast, her two relationships with actual people in the novella, her love for and

friendship with Gerard and her affair with her student, Darrel, are fraught with fear


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and posturing on all sides. In her teaching, as well, Benna avoids discussing intimacy

and emotions; she presents Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” solely in terms of its

commas, and her comments on student poems pertain chiefly to spelling and the

correct use of “lie” and “lay.” Her imagination allows her to escape, at least

temporarily, from dissatisfying and disappointing relationships and experience their

alternatives.

30 The novella’s point of view underscores Benna’s fractured identity, but a shift in point

of view also dramatizes the depth of her loss and isolation. Throughout the novella,

first person is used for segments that tell of Benna’s links with Gerard and Darrell as

well as for those with the imaginary Georgianne and Eleanor. The conflation of these

real and surreal relationships and the immediacy of all four of them for Benna’s

existence is shown by how quickly and smoothly she glides from one aspect of her

personal life to another, all narrated in first person. On just one page, for example,

appear “I open the door [to Darrell],” “I ask Gerard on the phone,” and “I sit on the

edge of the bathtub, drying off Georgianne” (146).

31 However, third person is used for segments that detail her life as a teacher; in fact, the

perspective is so removed that Benna is referred to as “the teacher” rather than by

name: “The teacher took a walk before her afternoon class” (155). Benna appears to be

observing her actions in this role as if they were performed by a completely different

entity. When she learns of Gerard’s death, the point of view shifts abruptly from first to

third person, and Benna is referred to as “the teacher” even though she is not

performing a teaching role at all at that moment; in fact, she has lost her teaching

position altogether. Benna moves from the vulnerable, revelatory first person to the

extremely objective (and relatively controlling) role of teacher, an escape marked by

the retreat into third-person narration. The next thirteen pages continue the third-

person narration, although they refer to Benna by name. She is described as “feeling

that she’d been made, forever and for now,... stupid with loneliness, bereft of any truth

or wisdom or flicker of poetry, possessed only of the wild glaze of a person who spends

entire days making things up” (213).

32 Ultimately, though, Benna is returned to the telling of her own story: in the last two

pages, she returns to a life amalgamated of make-believe and reality, resurrecting

Georgianne: “She is a gift I have given myself, a lozenge of pretend” (225). The return of

her imaginary child fills Benna’s life with intimacy and fragments of poetry as well as

marks a new self-realization about the depth of her need for fantasy. The “wild glaze”

and self-excoriation that followed her confession to Gerard has been tempered into a

self-forgiveness, an acceptance of the peace that only her “daughter” can give her.

33 Anagrams was marketed as a novel, which emphasizes the connections between

chapters, themes, characters, motifs, and plots. But the novelistic genre also implies a

linear progression through the narrative that does not take place from chapter to

chapter; rather, the novella provides the missing piece that clarifies the links

throughout the book (once again evoking Felski’s aesthetic in the “disruption of...

linear time and plot” [26]). The novella provides an explanation for the discrepancies

among the preceding stories, a culmination of Benna’s experiences. Through

considering all the stories, we come to a cumulative understanding of Benna in all her

many lived and imaginary roles.

34 Moore comments on the “cubist” style of Anagrams, a metaphor that evokes the various

roles presented with postponed resolution and Benna’s divergent attempts to negotiate


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her life-choices and relationships. According to Moore, the multiplicity of possibilities

“ironically... ends up revealing what few possibilities and arrangements a single life

may ever have, even allowing for the reckless ride of the imagination...” (Gaffney 64).

This reflection may be Moore’s most sobering comment on female identity of all, partly

explaining the similarity in age and temperament of many of Moore’s characters in Self-

Help, Birds of America, and Anagrams. Perhaps the angst of introspective early-middle-

age is inescapable, no matter what routes one has taken to fulfill one’s life or what

linguistic or structural tricks one creates to escape it.

35 These three texts are similar in their cyclical structure, their focus on multiple

identities and roles for women, and their emphasis on language and wordplay. Moore’s

interest in the creation of women’s lives and selves is evident in these books, but it

appears in her other work as well. The protagonist of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,

Moore’s 1994 novel, meditates on the idea of her own identity formation and

fragmentation:

I often think that at the center of me is... a house in my heart so invaded with other

people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I

can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of

them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then

vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of

nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone? (17)

36 This populated “house in the heart” is exactly where Moore’s characters, quintessential

mid-life women, do create themselves: bumping against others in various

configurations, they become an anagram of all they have known. Their voices split, and

the search for identity becomes a matter of finding harmony in the chorus that speaks

from their own throats, a unifying melody that gives shape to the self.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York:

Routledge, 1990.

Blades, John. “Lorrie Moore: Flipping Death the Bird.” Publishers Weekly 24 August 1998: 31-32.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.

Drzal, Dawn Ann. “An Assemblage of Trifles.” Commonweal 112 (1985): 505-07.

Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Gaffney, Elizabeth. “Lorrie Moore: The Art of Fiction CLXVII.” The Paris Review 158 (Spring/

Summer 2001): 56-84.

Gardiner, Judith Kegan. “On Female Identity and Writing by Women.” Writing and Sexual

Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982: 177-91.

Iannone, Carol. “Post-Counterculture Tristesse.” Commentary Feb. 1987: 57-61.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Jokers Wild.” New York Times 18 Oct. 1986, late ed.: 15.


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—. Rev. of Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore. New York Times 6 March 1985: C21.

Malin, Irving. Rev. of Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore. Review of Contemporary Fiction 19.1 (1999):

196.

McInerney, Jay. “New and Improved Lives.” The New York Times Book Review 24 March 1985: 32.

Merritt, Stephanie. “Middle-Aged Cred.” The Observer [London] 8 Nov. 1998, Observer Review

section: 13.

Moore, Lorrie. Anagrams. New York: Knopf, 1986.

—. Birds of America. New York: Knopf, 1998.

—. Self-Help. New York: Knopf, 1985.

—. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? New York: Knopf, 1994.

Perrick, Penny. “Metro Critics’ Pick of the Year.” The Times [London], 5 Dec. 1998, Metro section:

22.

Rev. of Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore. Publishers Weekly 20 July 1998: 207.

ABSTRACTS

L'article intitulé "Construction identitaire dans les cycles de nouvelles de Lorrie Moore"

développe l'hypothèse selon laquelle nombre de femmes auteurs se servent du genre "cycle de

nouvelles" pour représenter les périls que, à notre époque, traverse la quête identitaire féminine

avant d'atteindre son unité faite de fragments. Le cycle de nouvelles dont l'unité est faite

d'histoires individuelles, convient bien à la représentation de cette quête parce que dans le cadre

de la littérature post-moderne, l'identité féminine apparaît souvent comme une mosaïque. C'est

précisément cette quête d'unité identitaire qu'illustrent les personnages des trois cycles de

nouvelles de Lorrie Moore Anagrams, Self Help et Birds of America. Les personnages féminins qui

habitent ces nouvelles tentent de réconcilier leur désir d'indépendance avec l'image

"traditionnelle" et persistante de la femme victime à l'autel du devoir quotidien. Elles y

parviennent ou pas, selon les cas, à des degrés différents.

AUTHORS

KAREN WEEKES

Karen Weekes has written a chapter on Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams in the forthcoming The

Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues (Greenwood Press). Her criticism has appeared in The

Southern Literary Journal, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and The Cambridge Companion to Poe. She

is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University, Abington College, where she is completing a

manuscript on the life-writing of female academics.


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Journal of the Short Story in English, 39

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