E S S A Y S
Gathering "Scattered Allegiances": The Alther Heroine's Journey "in Search of Labels"
Harriette C. Buchanan
Appalachian State University
Lisa Alther's novels, for the most part, concern young
women coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, a time whose turmoil is amply
reflected in their lives as they struggle for a sense of personal identity.
Alther defines some of this struggle in the essay "Border States" as
she grapples with images from her Appalachian heritage. The essay organizes
itself around the story of AltherÕs paternal grandmother Hattie Elizabeth
Vanover Reed who descended from farmers and coal miners in the Appalachian
Mountains of southwestern Virginia, but who invented for herself a patrician
Tidewater Virginia heritage. In describing the personal experiences against
which she formulates her stories, Alther says, "Almost everything I know
about creating fiction is a legacy from [Hattie Elizabeth Vanover Reed]. Faced
with the void, or with a reality too grim or too complicated to endure, she
simply decided that she was a Tidewater lady and then turned herself into
one" ("Border States," 30). In her fictions, Alther's heroines
engage in a process similar to that Alther describes for her grandmother, but
with varying degrees of success. Beginning with Kinflicks and ending with Five Minutes in Heaven, the Alther heroine, to date, has traced a number of
paths through her heritage in an attempt to establish an identity with which
she can live. She has, like Ginny Babcock in Kinflicks gathered the "scattered allegiances" (70)
of her upbringing in pursuit, like Ginny's mother, "of labels" (91)
with which to define herself.
The first Alther heroine whose journey we follow,
through Kinflicks, is Ginny
Babcock Bliss. We meet Ginny as she flies home to her mother's hospital
bedside, summoned by an attentive neighbor whose own vigil is interrupted for a
trip to the Holy Land with the National Baptist Women's Union (20). Ginny's
history gradually unfolds in first person flashback chapters that intersperse
with third person chapters that narrate the frame story of Ginny's return to
her childhood home, Hullsport, Tennessee, and of her attempts to communicate
with her mother. Ginny's mother, afflicted with the obscurely named
"idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura" (80), prickles under the
indignity both of her ailment, characterized by uncontrollable bleeding and
bruising, and of the necessity of submitting to the hospital regime. Over the
weeks of her mother's dying, Ginny works to come to terms with her past and
with her mother. The "scattered allegiances" to which Ginny thinks
she refers are those of her heritage. As a child she would visit with her
grandfather who had come down from the mountains of Virginia to the valley of
Tennessee and founded the munitions factory that his son in law came from
Boston to manage. Repudiating his success as a manufacturer, grandfather Zed
had retreated to the cabin he built when he was first married and, as the
locals said, had "done gone mental" (70). His advice to Ginny is,
"don't you never try to be what you ain't," to which her anguished
reply is, "but what am
I" (70). Ginny's review of her personal history includes:
being born in a farm cabin in Virginia with a rural
southern mother and an industrialist father from Boston, and with refugees from
the coal mines for grandparents; growing up in a fake antebellum mansion in a
factory town in the New South with a dairy farm out her back door; being
christened ÒVirginiaÓ by her mother in a burst of geographic chauvinism and
ÒBabcockÓ by her father, which name emblazoned the walls of a hall at Harvard.
Being a human melting pot, to what one god--social or economic or
geographic--was she to direct her scattered allegiances? (70)
Ginny initially identifies her scattered allegiances as being between her Southern
mother's heritage and her Yankee father's heritage, but as we read on, we
realize the allegiances are more confused and more scattered than even Ginny
herself realizes. The novel becomes Ginny's attempt to sift through her
memories and longings to try to sort herself out.
Ginny's confusion is, to a certain extent, mirrored by
that of her mother who has been for nine years reading her way through the
volumes of the family's encyclopedia. When the third person narrator allows us
into Mrs. Babcock's mind, we learn that she, like Ginny, is searching. We
learn that, despite her affinity for the "uplifting literature" of
the Book of Common Prayer and for the "soothing ritual" of the
Episcopal services, Mrs. Babcock's faith "resided elsewhere, in the form
of a mute confidence in the scheme of things. However much she might question
some of its manifestations, she had maintained a silent conviction that there
was a point to life, and to having lived. She had begun reading the
encyclopedia in search of labels" (91). Mrs. Babcock's search for labels,
like Ginny's attempts to focus her scattered allegiances, is an attempt to find
meaning and to reconcile with that meaning. The pattern established by Ginny
and her mother as they remember their lives and attempt to come to terms with
one another is a pattern that pervades Alther's fiction.
Ginny's review of her past begins with high school
memories. Her first achievements are as a flag swinger and as the girl friend
of the football hero Joe Bob Sparks. During this period of her life, Ginny
sported her "Never-Tell padded bra" (32), cordovan tassel loafers,
and madras plaid shirtwaist dresses with Peter Pan collars (33) to win approval
from the high school set that worshipped its football heroes. Her success is
represented by her acquisition of Joe Bob's class ring and his letter jacket,
which her enraged father, the Major, makes her return. The Major's vigilance,
combined with Coach's surveillance of Joe Bob's activities, eventually dooms
this relationship, which has degenerated to hand jobs in the photography dark
room and in the trunk of their friend's car. Partly in retaliation, Ginny
begins dating her childhood friend Clem Cloyd, the motor cycle riding crippled
son of the Major's tenant farmer. As this relationship becomes more intense,
resulting in Ginny's final loss of virginity, Ginny changes wardrobe. She
adopts Maxine Pruitt's teen rebel wardrobe of "a long sleeved sweater
buttoned up the back, with a bra [referred to later as a "'Do-It' Pruitt
bra" (142)] that had pointed cups like party hats; . . .[and] a too-tight
straight skirt" (137). The disaster that ends this relationship comes
when Ginny escapes from the Persimmon Plains Queen contest, which she must attend
as the previous year's winner, on the back of Clem's motor cycle, protected
only by Clem's red silk windbreaker. Predictably they crash and Ginny, in
despair from a hospital bed, writes applications for northern colleges under
the Major's direction. Her application to Worthley College is characterized by
this despair. Her essay, valued by Miss Head for its originality, reads,
"I don't really wish to attend Worthley. I'm being held prisoner in a
hospital bed. Please send help" (173).
Ginny arrives at Worthley in her teen rebel wardrobe,
topped by Clem's mended red silk dragon embroidered jacket. After an initial
semester of despair, Ginny once more changes her allegiance and her wardrobe.
She comes to admire Miss Head, her philosophy teacher and mentor, and adopts
her wardrobe of "wool suits and . . . high-necked nylon blouses, an
antique cameo brooch, and some low-heeled simple shoes" (190). Throwing
herself into the life of the mind, Ginny immerses herself in Miss Head's
favorite philosopher Descartes and engages in efforts to deny the body as part
of her search for Cartesian "certainty" (185). This pursuit lasts
until, under the influence of her dorm neighbor Edna "Eddie" Holzer,
Ginny realizes with dismay that she can feel only philosophical detachment when
another dorm resident attempts suicide. Ginny and Eddie engage one another
first intellectually and then physically, opening the joy of lesbianism for
Ginny. Ginny flees Worthley to a series of communal habitations with Eddie,
both living on Ginny's trust fund.
Ginny's wardrobe again changes, with the wool suits
being replaced by "wheat jeans and turtlenecks and sandals and a braid
like Eddie's" (273). In a chapter entitled "Divided Loyalties"
Ginny tells about her life with Eddie, a life that begins with idealistic
commitment to communal poverty but ends in conflict between Ginny and Eddie
over the business that generates Ginny's trust fund, the goals of the hippie
Free Farm in the face of Stark's Bog's conservatism, and the jealousy that
Eddie, groundlessly, feels over Ginny's friendship with Ira Bliss. After
Eddie's horrible death and the fire that destroys their cabin in the Vermont
woods, Ginny is ready for yet another change. Ira rescues her and she falls in
love with the security that his position in Stark's Bog can bring. Once more
changing allegiance and wardrobe, Ginny dons the polyester pants suit of the
suburban housewife and settles into "Wedded Bliss" (Chapter 11,
375-413).
True to her restless nature, domesticity soon palls
for Ginny. The birth of her daughter Wendy temporarily satisfies her as she
determines that she "at last" had found "a profession I could
summon some genuine enthusiasm for: wetnursehood" (399). Wendy too soon,
however, outgrows nursing. Ginny feels increasingly divided between her
marriage to Ira with its the suburban lifestyle, characterized by an endless
round of Tupperware parties, surprise showers, and church socials, and her
continuing friendship with and loyalty to her hippie friends. She visits their
commune outside Stark's Bog and is reminded of the freedom of being unbound by
any conventional need for routine. Suburbanism soon becomes ennui that is
broken by the appearance in her back yard of Hawk, a Vietnam War deserter and
refugee from Canada where he had sought sanctuary.
With Hawk, Ginny begins her final quest before the
frame story's return to Hullsport. Enticed by his apparent mastery of eastern
mysticism, embodied in the Mandala tattoo on his arm, Ginny engages in a course
of instruction that she hopes will result in the ultimate orgasm. Confused by
Hawk's delays in getting to the intercourse that she regards as the main goal,
Ginny never truly engages in the eastern-seeming rites on which Hawk insists.
When Ginny thinks they are finally going to achieve their mutual goal, she and
Hawk get drunk and pass out, only to be awakened by the enraged Ira who drives
them both from his home at gun point. This event coincides with the summons to
return to Hullsport, so Ginny's internal review of her history has as part of
its purpose the determination of whether or not she will return to Ira.
Ginny's internal debate over her own future takes
place along with the external attempt she makes to come to terms with her
mother. We learn that Mrs. Babcock believes that she has spent her life
sacrificing herself to wifehood and motherhood, but Ginny's version of her
childhood reveals a distant and disengaged mother. Even as Mrs. Babcock lies
dying, she and Ginny have great difficulty in communicating both their current
realities and the hopes and dreams that neither has realized. Mrs. Babcock,
with Ginny's help, has finished reading the encyclopedia, but the comfort of
identifying labels has eluded her. For a while Ginny preserves for her mother
the fiction that all is well between her and Ira, but Mrs. Babcock is shrewd
enough to realize that Ginny is deeply unhappy and that the cause of that
unhappiness is undoubtedly her personal life. Ginny fantasizes about rearing
Wendy in the home in which she grew up, but this dream is dashed when Mrs.
Babcock reveals that she has sold both the Georgian mansion in which Ginny grew
up and the cabin in which Ginny is currently staying. By the novel's end, Mrs.
Babcock has died and Ginny is packing her only tangible family heirloom, a
clock that has been lovingly preserved and handed down through the generations
in Ginny's mother's family. Her divided allegiances have not been fully
settled, but for the first time she seems to be acting rather than reacting. Her
only positive step is the determination that she wants to divorce Ira. Ginny's
history of divided allegiances has been both the internal divisions between her
Southern and Yankee heritage and the external loyalties that can be identified
with the labels teen queen, teen rebel, Ivy League grind, lesbian hippie,
suburban housewife, and new age experimenter. We do not know where Ginny will
go next, but we have hope that she has learned enough about herself to begin
making positive choices for her life instead of being a passive victim of
circumstance.
I have spent this much time explicating Ginny's
divided allegiances and search for labels because she provides the model on
which other Alther heroines form variations, each searching different aspects
of her personality and her world and each arriving at slightly different places
as a result of that search. Also I am interested in the pairing Alther makes
of her heroines with significant others who provide the type of Hegelian
dialectic to which Ginny is attracted. Soon after her return to Hullsport,
Ginny considers the heritage from her maternal ancestors, a process of keeping
house and bearing children that she fears has no point. She says, "It was
exhausting, this process, and in contradiction to Hegel, no progress appeared
to be resulting from this recurring juxtaposition of thesis and
antithesis" (249). Ginny's assessment that the dialectic is failing is
accurate in that thesis-antithesis has been for her a recurring cycle, never
resulting in a synthesis that represents growth. Her determination to be
independent may be the first synthesis to result from the thesis of her search
for meaning in others and the antithesis of her realization that personal
meaning cannot be put on externally like a change of wardrobe.
When we meet Caroline Kelley in Other Women (I am omitting Original Sins from this analysis because its main characters are
"the Five" (3) and not a single individual or a pair of individuals),
we meet a woman who has made some progress from Ginny's position at the end of Kinflicks. Caroline suffers from a depression for which she
seeks assistance from Hannah Burke, a psychoanalyst. Caroline believes that
part of her depression results from revulsion at the grimness of the external
world, embodied in the Jonestown Massacre in which hundreds blindly followed
Jim Jones into suicide. HannahÕs therapy leads her to see that her depression
is more from internal demons from her childhood that she has repressed or
ignored. In the course of this treatment, we learn not only of CarolineÕs
demons, but also of the ghosts that haunt Hannah. The readers are put through
a series of thesis-antithesis positions as we see first Caroline's pain from
being neglected by her parents and from selecting lovers who cannot provide the
affirmation that she so desperately needs and see next the guilt from which
Hannah suffers as she is pursued by the ghosts of her past in war-torn Europe
and of the children that she could not save from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Caroline's divided allegiances begin over her loyalties to her unloving
parents, to her lover Diana and to her sons, Jackie and Jason. From the
story's start, Caroline is consumed with jealousy over Diana's new friendship
with Suzanne. This loss, the most recent of many that Caroline tells Hannah
and us about, is the ostensible personal cause of the depression for which she
consults Hannah. As Caroline knowingly but helplessly establishes a
"transference" (65) with Hannah as the authority figure that
validates her existence, we see Hannah's ambivalent reactions to the process.
Hannah values Caroline for the woman she is and for the wry sense of humor that
she brings to the consulting room, but she fears that Caroline will be unable
to see the root of all of her problems in unhappy childhood. Caroline seeks
Hannah's approval with her winning humor and with the gift of home-baked bread.
Hannah enjoys the humor but seems to reject the gift, an object lesson for
Caroline to find value in her person rather than in the gifts and favors she
can provide.
Caroline's allegiances, like Ginny's, are
characterized by the people for whom she feels attachment and by the roles she
plays, with their appropriate labels, in those relationships. First with her
parents, she is the dutiful daughter on whom they can lay guilt for their own
shortcomings and from whom they can reliably expect nurturing care. Because
her mother was always too tired from her endless rounds of doing good for
others, Caroline became the surrogate mother for her younger brothers. Her
nurturing nature finds its natural outlet in her nursing career. There she
attaches herself to Arlene, the nursing instructor for whom she becomes the pet
student doing personal chores to gain favor. After she graduates from nursing
school, Caroline is dismayed when Arlene adopts another student as favorite and
their friendship fails. Next Caroline marries Jackson and gains an upscale
suburban home and two sons, but as it did for Ginny Babcock, suburban security
fades into boredom, and a volunteer job at the hospital leads to an affair with
a hippie doctor who is running a storefront clinic for the indigent for which
he steals drugs from the hospital. Caroline leaves Jackson for David Michael,
but this relationship also fails as she demands a monogamy from David Michael
that he is unwilling to provide. This is the point at which she moves in with
Diana, a friend from nursing school whose marriage has also failed. They are
first roommates, but then become lovers as each discovers the pleasures of the
female body. This history is labeled by Caroline herself as being "Miss
Kitty to Jackson's Matt Dillon; Maid Marion to David Michael's Robin Hood;
Cherry Ames, Rural Nurse, alongside Diana" (240). What Hannah eventually
enables her to see is that all of these roles, despite their varying labels,
are repetitions of the subservient daughter role that she could never
adequately play. During the course of her therapy, Caroline has flirted with
Brian, a doctor at the hospital, whom she sees as someone who can rescue her
from her quandary. Hannah realizes that Caroline's relationship with Brian,
whom she saw professionally during the breakup of his first marriage, will only
be a repetition of the masochistic, self-denying servant role with which
Caroline has become so comfortable. Hannah's strength as a therapist is that
she allows Caroline to realize this and to reject Brian on her own. By the end
of Other Women Caroline has
successfully, for the most part, completed her therapy. Her future with Diana
remains problematic, but she and Hannah are likely to move from being patient
and therapist to being friends. Significantly, she is also changing from being
an emergency room nurse to being an obstetrical nurse. Her future choices and
decisions will, we hope, be made from the perspective of generating life rather
than from the often-futile perspective of desperately trying to save lives that
the accidents and cruelty of the world threaten. CarolineÕs thesis position of
victim of her own lack of self-esteem has been successfully countered by the
antithesis of HannahÕs confidence in herself as a therapist. Meanwhile
reviewing her responses to Caroline, who is about the same age as her dead
daughter Mona would have been, enables Hannah to allay some of her own grief
and guilt over the deaths of Mona and Nigel. For Caroline and Hannah, the
dialectic process has been successful as each moves forward as a healthier,
more integrated person.
Clea Shawn, the main character in Bedrock, like Caroline Kelley, attempts to establish a
meaning for her life. Unlike Caroline, Clea presents herself as happily
married and is very prosperous and professionally successful. Like Caroline,
Clea maintains a relationship of long-standing with a female friend who serves
as antithesis to the thesis of her existence. Clea had first met Elke twenty
years earlier when she was assigned to do a photo essay on Elke and her
sculpture. Although they have become fast friends and respect each other
professionally, Elke claims that Clea's photography is relentlessly pretty and
superficial, lacking real depth and meaning. Clea sees Elke's sculptures of
tortured people and relentlessly gloomy outlook as excessively depressing.
Clea and her philandering husband Turner travel constantly, often living in
foreign countries for years at a time. Elke hates travel and remains shut in
her New York studio and apartment with her overly protective husband Terence.
Clea has become as promiscuous as Turner over the years, but has found that
role to be unsatisfactory. At the beginning of Bedrock, Clea, with her usual enthusiasm, has fallen in love
with the rural loveliness of Roches Ridge, Vermont, and buys the ancestral home
of the last Roche, intending to remodel it into an English manor house. She
hires a local workman who begins work. Her optimism remains undimmed despite
the bathtub falling through the rotten floor into the garbage filled basement
and more masses of garbage revealed as winter snows melt from the back yard that
she had envisioned as a formal English garden. Seeing the local landscape with
her coffee-table book eye, she decides to take scores of photographs and write
a book about "The Town That Time Forgot" (65). Her vision of this
rural idyll is shattered, however, when the town's idiosyncratic personality
asserts itself, specifically in the form of a severed human foot that her puppy
discovers on her property. The discovery of this foot throws the relentlessly
cheerful Clea into a depression. This depression is so uncharacteristic that
it moves Elke to travel to Vermont to see to her friend.
Elke's trip to Vermont is motivated not only by her
concern for her friend, but also by the stasis she is feeling in her own work.
Her current statue of a bayoneted baby will not come to life, so she destroys
it and is unable to muster the creative impulse to begin anything else. In
Vermont, the Marsh house next door to Clea's Roche House intrigues Elke. The
Marshes, the other founding family of Roches Ridge, have degenerated into a
poorly educated clan that sport names like Polly, Esther, Orlon, Rayon, and
Dacron because the Marsh matriarch, Waneeta, drew her inspiration from clothing
labels (25). Orlon relentlessly hunts and traps and nails his trophies to the
sides of the house and out buildings. Clea had discovered that the youngest
son, Dack, has an artistic flair for turning these grisly trophies into totemic
works of art. When Elke begins caring for Clea, Clea responds by creating a
studio for Elke in Roche House. They fall into a comfortable routine, with
Clea awakening Elke with coffee in bed. As Elke drinks her coffee, Clea
brushes her own hair with ElkeÕs brush. She then pulls their mixed hairs from
the brush and lays them on the windowsill for birds to use in nesting. Elke
begins working in secret, consulting only Dack Marsh.
Meanwhile, Clea, whose camera trigger finger has been
refusing to snap the cheerful pictures she formerly took, has finally begun
taking pictures of Roches Ridge that juxtapose the picturesque with the quirky.
Clea has come to Elke's awareness that "if you extracted a fragment from
its context in time and space, you were falsifying reality, representing a part
as the whole, the fleeting as permanent" (287). She begins a new series
of pictures of Roches Ridge of which Elke approves. She shows Elke, and us,
pictures of
Ishtar before the New Age Travel sign, which hung from
the eaves of a handsome old colonial. . . . Gordon, his brother Jared, and his
horse before the spray-painted silo, which rose like a graffiti-covered
lighthouse from an ocean of swelling mud. The Boudiccas in karate postures
before their tepees, the distant mountains lying like a naked woman in the
background. Dack with his stern Abenaki features posing proudly with his
crowbar atop the mountain of junked cars. (315)
Elke
is proud of Clea's accomplishment and urges her to publish these, more
authentic pictures as the real Roches Ridge. Meanwhile Elke finally reveals
the sculpture on which she has been working in secret. From junk and animal
parts, supplied by Dack, Elke has created a winged female figure rising from a
pile of rubble. "It was surreal, representational, and abstract all at
once. Maternal tenderness mixed with a fierce primal exuberance, strength with
pity. The woman seemed at once firmly grounded--earthbound even, buried to her
waist in ruins, seemingly assembled from the debris itself--yet poised for
flight" (313). Both women, coming from nearly opposite perspectives have
arrived at a kind of middle ground. Clea's glossy, superficial thesis that
creates advertisements and glossy coffee-table books has been countered by
Elke's antithesis that wallows in the grimness and destruction of war and
violence. The resulting synthesis has Clea creating more realistic images of
flawed, yet hopeful, reality and has Elke creating, from similar found objects
as those she has always used, a more positively energetic form of sculpture.
Clea and Elke have each abandoned some of the posturing of their previous lives
and come together more strongly, both physically and emotionally.
In
Five Minutes in Heaven Alther
focuses on one central character, Jude, whose significant others are a series
of friends from whom she seeks protection and personal definition. The first
section of the novel, titled "Molly," details Jude's friendship with
Molly, who is a year older, from the time they are five and six until Molly's
death as a teenager. Molly protects Jude from the Commie Killers, a
neighborhood gang of boys, and they become fast friends, even after the
teen-aged Molly starts dating the chief Commie Killer. Jude's dreamy
fearfulness is countered by Molly's intrepid aggression against all elements of
her world. After Molly's death, we next see Jude as she begins graduate school
in New York and renews her friendship with Sandy. Sandy had befriended Jude
and Molly in their combat against the Commie Killers and had remained a distant
friend. Jude moves in with him and his assortment of friends in New York. She
is somewhat surprised to learn of his homosexuality and is devastated when he
is beaten to death, apparently by a homophobic thug who has been taunting him
near their subway stop. After SandyÕs death, Jude drops out of graduate school
and accepts an editorial job with the firm for which his lover Simon works.
There she meets Anna, a poet and poetry workshop leader, whose collection of
student poems Jude edits. Anna's glamour attracts Jude and they become first
friends and then lovers. Too late Jude realizes that Anna has a serious
drinking problem and seems to willingly accept her husbandÕs physical abuse.
Once more a close friend dies and Jude is left alone. Jude's life has been
marked by the deaths of significant others, beginning with her mother's death
when Jude was four. Losing first her mother, then Molly, then Sandy, and
finally Anna has sent Jude into a severe depression which Simon proposes to
alleviate by sending her to Paris to work with his associate Jasmine. Jasmine
tries to incorporate Jude into her coterie, but with limited success. Jude's
despair is not alleviated by her French co-workers' endless discussions of love
and life. One of these discussions turns into a discussion of language itself.
Ah
non," murmured Martine.
"To label is to unmask, and to unmask is to alter."
Jude realizes that these arguments are presented
merely as intellectual exercise, and she cannot find the revivifying
stimulation that Simon had hoped Paris would bring. Jude finally feels herself
coming alive when she develops a crush on an exotic dancer named Olivia. Like
a lovesick teen, Jude follows Olivia through Paris, even having a one-night
stand with her. Olivia rejects Jude's attempts to deepen their relationship
and Jude again despairs. Jude, in the final part of the story entitled
"Jude," begins to come to terms with herself and to realize that she,
herself, is her own most reliable source of strength. She literally descends
into the Paris underground catacombs and dreams of the loved ones who have
died, wishing to join them in her own death. The will to live is, however, too
strong and she revives, emerging to learn that she has spent two days
underground. As she returns to her apartment, "she wandered down the
shopping street, dazed like Rip van Winkle by the foodstuffs spilling from the
shops . . . exotic fruits and vegetables from the former colonies, which she
squeezed and poked as though she knew what she was doing. Suddenly, she was ravenous"
(359). Jude's revitalization is accompanied with an increased self-confidence
that enables her to participate in the lunchtime debates that Jasmine and her
associates conduct. Long perplexed by the French temperament,
Jude had finally figured out that the route to
conversational brilliance here was to take an assumption, such as that sex
shows were sexy, and contradict it. So, launching her first plunge into the
waters of lunchtime controversy, she suggested haltingly that Americans were
often more interested in the pleasurable sensations their bodies experienced
during lovemaking than in power manipulations. (364)
Infuriated
by the French conviction that only they understand the vagaries of love, Jude
goes on the attack, bolstered by her awareness that she "had earned her
spurs in the rodeo of l'amour.
She had won several purple hearts on the killing fields of love. She had
crawled on her belly through the trenches of despair. She had faced down death
in the foxholes of failed affection. She had stripped off her armor to parade
unafraid on the battlements of passion" (365). In short, she is no longer
wallowing in the self-pity of these failed loves but is now marching to their
tunes. With renewed confidence Jude returns to New York to reclaim her
grandmother's Francis I silverware from Simon's attic and to resume her life.
Through her failed loves, each presenting a different type of antithesis to her
thesis of need and loneliness, Jude has finally arrived at a kind of synthesis.
The
Alther heroine is frequently paired with an antithetical foil character who
contains strengths and/or qualities that she envies, to whom she feels the
"scattered allegiances" of tradition and loyalty. Over the course of
the four novels detailed here, she moves from the uncertainty of Ginny Babcock
Bliss, to the greater confidence developed by both Caroline Kelley and Hannah
Burke, to the synthesis achieved by Clea Shawn and her friend Elke, to the
recapitulation of this process with Jude who moves from dependence on Molly,
Sandy, and Anna, to an independence from which she no longer seeks rescue by
ghosts. On this journey, the Alther heroine tries on and rejects various
labels, coming eventually to a realization that the labels falsify. What
emerges through these novels is a sense that allegiances and labels do, as
Robert's facetious argument indicates, limit and destroy. An even more
compelling image emerges through metaphors for growth and change.
One
of the metaphors that run through most of the stories is the metaphor of the
birds. In Kinflicks Ginny is
distressed to discover some baby birds whose nest has fallen down the chimney
of her cabin. She makes abortive attempts to have the parent birds reclaim the
babies, screaming at their parental neglect. Finally she takes over the
nurturance of the babies, only to have them begin to die. Some of the few who
survive on her feeding regime, die as she attempts to give them flying lessons,
with her chief strategy being to toss them into the air and watch as they crash
to earth. One finally survives and learns to fly, but meets an untimely end.
Unsure whether or not her mother is awake enough to hear, Ginny tells her,
"The last bird died yesterday. . . . It just hopped off my finger and
started darting around, trying to get out. Finally it crashed into the window,
and fell on the floor dead. Mother
. . . the bird beat itself to death on a closed window. But the door next to
it was wide open" (508).
This bird story is metaphoric for Ginny's sense of her life. She feels that
her own mother was as inept in rearing her as she was in knowing how to nurture
the baby birds. Like the final baby bird, she too feels that she has crashed
into closed windows without knowing that an open door was nearby. Unlike the baby
bird, however, she may, we hope, find the open door of personal independence
before beating herself to death against the closed windows of the allegiances
she has previously made to Joe Bob, Clem, Miss Head, Eddie, Ira, and Hawk.
In
Other Women the metaphoric bird is
the pileated woodpecker that Caroline sees in the woods as she ponders Hannah's
advice that reality is controlled by how we choose to see things. Skiing with
her sons, she sees a dead tree and worries that a falling branch might hurt
someone. Then she stops herself: "Suddenly it occurred to her that she
didn't have to think about ravaging owls or amputated legs on such a beautiful
afternoon. She could think instead about sculpted snow gleaming in the sun.
Hannah had said that whether you were depressed depended on what you saw when
you looked around" (95). Soon after this revelation, she spots the rare
pileated woodpecker. The pileated woodpecker appears again later in the story
to remind her that "what you saw depended on how you focused" (367).
Different birds reappear, with clearly symbolic force, in the novel's final
scene. Caroline and Hannah walk outdoors together and see "that the
branches, swollen with new buds, were filled with chattering yellow evening
grosbeaks, fresh back from more balmy lands, sporting their jaunty masks like
revelers returning from a Caribbean carnival" (380). On this optimistic
note, we leave Caroline and Hannah, hoping that each will always hear the birds
chattering.
The
birds that factor in Bedrock are
somewhat different. First there are the disembodied bird wings that Orlon has
nailed onto the walls of the Marsh house. These are first seen as bizarre
trophies, but later they lend themselves to Elke's magnificent sculpture. Then
there is the outrageous parrot belonging to Starshine, the self-appointed guru
of the Boudiccas. This parrot, named Che after Che Guevara whose name he keeps
announcing, along with other "political slogans from the sixties"
(119), including "We Shall Overcome!" (119) and "Make Love, Not
War!" (121), is Starshine's brightly colored companion whom she has
futilely been trying to teach the feminist slogan "The Personal Is
Political" (119). Che provides comic relief to the starkness of Orlon's
bird corpses. Finally there are the Baltimore orioles whose nest is being
woven from the mixed hairs that Clea has offered from Elke's brush. After
showing Elke her new pictures of Roches Ridge, Clea sees the pair of birds
working and calls Elke to the window. "Elke tiptoed over in her robe and
looked out at the birds' nest. It was almost entirely composed of interwoven
hairs--Elke's silver ones, and Clea's black and gray." Clea marvels,
"I think it's an omen" (315-316). This moment enables Clea and Elke
to consummate the sexual attraction that has always existed between them and
sets the stage for the novel's final scene in which the entire community of
Roches Ridge celebrates its bicentennial with a Bossy Bingo cow patty contest.
As they watch together, Waneeta Marsh comments, "Ever stop to think this
whole dang town might be a few logs short of a cord?" To which Clea
replies, "Well, it's not what I expected when I first arrived here. But
it'll do just fine" (325). Clea has found her ideal community, even if it
is not what she had initially envisioned.
Five
Minutes in Heaven shifts from birds
as metaphors for growth and change to more mythic references. There are, in
Bedrock, mythic overtones to Elke's final sculpture. The
winged woman that she has created is reminiscent of the famous Nike, Winged
Victory of Samothrace, sculpture. The mythic metaphor in Five Minutes in
Heaven occurs in the overall pattern
and in the sculptures that Jude notices in Paris. Jude's journey is
reminiscent of that followed by the hero of what Joseph Campbell identifies as
the monomyth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell says that "the standard path of the
mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula
represented in the rites of passage: separation--initiation--return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the
monomyth" (30). Part of the initiation phase of the cycle may be a
descent into an underworld where the hero confronts ghosts or demons. This
aspect of Jude's story is seen when she goes into the catacombs. The return,
in Campbell's version of the monomyth, is usually with a boon or gift; we see
this in Jude's return with a renewed enthusiasm and strength to reenter the
lists of love.
Through
all of these stories, one theme dominates, the effort required of the women who
are our main characters to forge together an identity from the "scattered
allegiances" and the "labels" with which they have worked. They
have all come of age during the 1960s, an era in American history when
traditional values were being questioned and stereotyped roles for women found
to be wanting. Each of the main characters I have discussed has tried on a
number of roles in search of an identity to truly call her own. To a greater
or lesser extent, each has gone through what Wallace Stevens, in "Of
Modern Poetry," calls "The poem of the mind in the act of finding /
What will suffice" (1-2). Stevens follows this opening with lines that
are echoed by what we have seen in Alther's heroines' lives.
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
Stevens
continues his meditation of how changing times necessitate changing attitudes
and poetic metaphors. He ends with a series of metaphors that again are echoed
in Alther's fiction:
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind. (218-219)
Alther's
heroines fight their ways through the minefields of modern life. Like Stevens'
fictive poet, they too are in search of "what will suffice."
Alther's maternal grandmother invented herself as a lady from the Virginia
Tidewater. Alther's heroines achieve various degrees of success in reviewing
their "scattered allegiances" and the "labels" available to
them in order to invent identities that will enable them to be most fully
themselves physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
Works Cited
Alther, Lisa. Bedrock. 1990. New York: Plume, 1996.
---. "Border States." Bloodroot:
Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers. Ed. Joyce Dyer. Lexington, KY: The University
Press of Kentucky, 1998. 21-30.
---. Five Minutes in Heaven. 1995. New York: Plume, 1996.
---. Kinflicks. 1975. New York: New American Library, 1977.
---. Original Sins. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
---. Other Women. 1984. New York: New American Library, 1985.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Bollingen Series XVII.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1997.
CREDIT:
IRON MOUNTAIN REVIEW 17 (Spring, 2001). Emory, VA: Emory and Henry College.
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