Rebecca

I recently watched the BBC Biopic on Daphne DuMarier, *Daphne* (2007), which dramatizes her bisexuality; her seemingly passionless marriage; her unrequited love for Ellen Doubleday, her publisher’s wife; and her affair with actress Gertrude Lawrence, as well as her writing career from the plagiarism trial over Rebecca to the writing of her short story “The Birds.” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963169/)

 

It had been a long time since I had read Rebecca (1938), so I watched the Hitchcock film to refresh my memory (1940).  According to Wikipedia, the film is fairly faithful to the novel with a couple of exceptions, namely changing the death of Rebecca from a murder by her husband to an accidental fall when he angrily confronts her and changing the character of Mrs. Danvers to make her younger, more mysterious, and more, well, lesbian. 

 

My own interpretation of the film version of Mrs. Danvers was that she was almost pathologically loyal to Rebecca and resentful of the second Mrs. de Winter, to the point of wanting to get rid of the second wife, almost like a child who hates her step-mother.   Mrs. Danvers is presented as unambiguously evil.  She always wears black and displays a malignant expression.  If you read her as lesbian, it could be because in those days the stereotypical lesbian was often a vampirish predator.

 

I don’t remember the novel well enough to speculate on whether this lesbian association could be found in the original text, but du Maurier may have seen her own same-sex attraction as evil, or at least, deviant.  In any case, her diaries reveal that she saw two sides to her own personality: the conventional wife and mother and the hidden male lover that energized her creativity. (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/935280.Myself_When_Young)

 

What if Rebecca were an expression of these two sides of her psyche?  Why is the narrator of the novel (the second Mrs. de Winter) unnamed?  Why is a crucial scene in the plot based on a costume that both Rebecca and the narrator wear?  Why does Rebecca herself have two sides to her personality: her public image as the beautiful, elegant wife of Maxim de Winter and her hidden side of sexual promiscuity, selfishness, cruelty, and deception?  Identity is clearly a prominent theme.

 

The unnamed second Mrs. de Winter is young, inexperienced, and naïve, compared to the sophisticated, worldly, and manipulative first wife, Rebecca.  The second wife could represent the conventional wife and mother identity that Daphne du Maurier presented in public, while Rebecca represents what du Maurier saw as her dark side of forbidden desire, sexual transgression, and duplicity.

 

So, why is the “good wife,” so to speak, unnamed?  Is that the author’s way of erasing her conventional self?  Is Rebecca’s death a way of symbolically killing off the dark side?  Does the novel express an identity conflict?  Does du Maurier unconsciously, if not consciously, reject both sides of her personality?

 

A Freudian or psychoanalytic critic would have no problem answering in the affirmative, and, I must say, I find that interpretation persuasive.

 

If Mrs. Danvers’ attachment to Rebecca, even after death, is read as lesbian, then her burning down of Manderly could perhaps represent the destructiveness that du Maurier saw, or feared, in her hidden desires.  Fire, of course, also represents the heat of passion.  Danvers’ own death in the conflagration may express du Maurier’s fear of her own self-destructive passion.  Is that why she retreated for the rest of her life into her conventional marriage after the death of Gertrude Lawrence?

 

On the other hand, her own words attribute her creativity to the “male lover” within.  Perhaps she was aware of the Freudian theory that repressed desire will manifest itself indirectly, often in creative work.  Perhaps it is safer to speculate, since speculation it is, that du Maurier was ambivalent about her same-sex desire, seeing it as potentially destructive if acted out and a source of energy if channeled into creative work.

 

I pose this interpretation tentatively and interrogatively because psychoanalytic criticism is often viewed skeptically as a form of practicing psychology without a license and pathologizing an author one has never met or interviewed.  Yet literature is a form of fantasy, and fantasy is often an expression of what has been sublimated, repressed, or denied.  I will leave it to my readers to conclude whether the parallels between du Maurier’s own autobiography and the novel are valid and significant.

 

Other ways of reading the novel include the gothic fear of irrationality and death and the age-old pattern of initiation, or coming-of-age, in which the “innocent” second wife comes to terms with the evil in the world, including, in her case, the knowledge that she loves, marries, and ultimately protects a murderer.  In either case, our narrator could be nameless the better to represent a universal human experience.  Neither of these readings is inconsistent with the other nor with the psychoanalytic interpretation.

Richard III as Tragedy

Shakespeare’s Richard III is categorized as a History Play (see previous post), but its official title is The Tragedy of King Richard III.  Given its deliberate distortion of historical fact and its well-established role in Tudor propaganda, perhaps it does make more sense to read the play as fictional tragedy than historical dramatization.  But how to turn a monstrous villain into a tragic hero?  This is where Shakespeare’s brilliance shows itself in this work.

Shakespeare’s tragedies grew out of the history plays, and it was not impossible for a tragic hero to have villainous qualities.  Consider Othello, who murders his wife, or Macbeth, who sinks deeper and deeper in blood as the play unfolds.  But the essence of tragedy involves a hero for whom the audience can feel some sympathy.  Othello is cruelly manipulated and urged on by Iago, as Macbeth is by Lady Macbeth.  The classical tragic hero is a larger than life character with great potential, whose tragic flaw leads to his (or her) downfall.  In the case of Othello, it’s jealousy and in the case of MacBeth, “vaulting ambition.” 

In some ways Richard III could be seen as a trial run for Macbeth, since ambition and lust for power are Richard’s downfalls, but no one eggs him on.  He is a larger than life character who simply chooses to get rid of anyone who stands in his way to the throne.  The classical tragic hero evokes “pity and fear,” pity for the hero and fear that, as human beings with our own flaws, we could fall as they do.  How to create sympathy for a purposeful villain like Richard?  How to make him a character that the audience can identify with?  And how to do so, and at the same time curry favor with your Tudor monarch by perpetuating the myth of Richard as a complete monster?

Shakespeare solved this problem by subtly psychologizing Richard as an unloved and unlovable man whose desperate desire for love twists him into a criminal.  His deformed body is merely an outward sign of a misshapen psyche, which becomes what it most hates.  And, tragically, Richard is fully conscious of his own depravity.

This theme is introduced in Richard’s opening speech: 

“But I…that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty/To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;/I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,/Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,/Deform’d, unfinish’d…/And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover/…I am determined to prove a villain…”

The idea of “dissembling nature” that has cheated him of a normal life continually recurs.  Margaret, widow of the lately dead King Henry VI, attacks Richard as a “slave of nature” and “son of hell.”  She goes on, “Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb!/And loathed issue of thy father’s loins!”  Richard’s own mother refers to her “accursed womb, the bed of death!” and refers to Richard as a “cockatrice” that she has “hatch’d to the world.”  Later she gives him her “most grievous curse.”  Richard is literally denied a mother’s love. 

And in the end, Richard struggles with his own self-loathing:  “Richard loves Richard…/O no! Alas, I rather hate myself…/I shall despair; there is no creature loves me,/And if I die no soul will pity me.”  Ironically, however, it is hard not to pity this man, alone in the end, facing the defeat he has brought on himself, having been deprived of a normal body, a mother’s love, and a healthy life.

Of all the murders Richard is accused of in the play, the worst is that of the two sons of his brother Edward IV, the young princes in line for the throne after Edward’s death.  The rumor was that Richard had had them smothered in their beds while they were supposedly housed in the Tower of London for their own protection. 

Shakespeare takes this image of innocent nature being suffocated and creates a powerful motif that applies to the smothering of Richard’s innocence, as well as to his victims. 

During the War of the Roses (according to Henry VI, Part 3) Richard’s own twelve-year-old brother, Rutland, had been murdered by a supporter of Margaret and Henry VI.  When Margaret confronts Richard with the murder of her husband and son, Richard reminds her of “the faultless blood of pretty Rutland.”  Later, children appear on stage, the son and daughter of Richard’s brother Clarence, grieving their father’s death, and then the two young sons of Edward IV, heirs to the throne before their murder.  A young Page is called on by Richard to name someone who would kill the young princes for money.  Thus are innocence and violence repeatedly linked.

At one point there is a reference to Richard growing so fast “That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old,” as if young Richard had outpaced his innocence and grown into maturity too soon. 

And when the murder of the young princes is described, the smothering of innocent nature is explicitly invoked:

“…thus…lay the gentle babes/…girdling one another/Within their alabaster innocent arms./Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,/…a book of prayers on their pillow lay…/…We smothered/The most replenished sweet work of Nature/That from the prime creation e’er she framed.”

Richard’s own childhood innocence, the text implies, had been stolen from him by his deformity from birth and the blood of family history, all of which culminates in a twisted psyche that substitutes the brutal pursuit of power for the love he has been denied and that ends as the victim of its own self-loathing.

Richard III is not only a tragedy of love and innocence, but also a tragedy of conscience.  When Richard’s innocence was smothered, his conscience was also suffocated. 

Early on Margaret curses Richard: “The worm of conscience shall begnaw thy soul!”  Later his mother and Elizabeth, mother of the young princes, seek to “smother” him with “the breath of bitter words.”  The ghost of Prince Edward, son of Henry VI, speaks to Richard using the same image of suffocation: “Let me sit heavy on thy soul…”  When the ghosts of all his victims appear, and speak, and disturb his sleep, Richard is temporarily stricken with the pangs of conscience:  “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,/…And every tale condemns me for a villain.”  Yet, even while conscious of his own guilt, he resists:  “Conscience is but a word that cowards use.”

Shakespeare’s texts are saturated with the theme of love and death, and in Richard III, we see lust transformed into the desire to destroy.  Scenes of courtship alternate with scenes of murder, just as Richard’s longing for love is perverted by his sense of being unloved and unlovable.  He mocks the value of love because he feels he cannot have it.

Ultimately, Richard’s tragedy reaches beyond himself.  Frequent references in the play evoke dark depths of history, time, events, and human psychology beyond the control of even such a larger-than-life character as Richard.

The opening lines suggest a tempest temporarily over, a stormy sea, and ocean depths.  Clarence’s dream takes place at sea, expresses his fear of drowning in “the tumbling billows of the main,” and calls up images of secrets in the deep.  As Hastings is taken to his own beheading, he bewails the “fatal bowels of the deep.”  Elsewhere, there are references to the “mighty sea” and the “swallowing gulf/Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion.”  Despite Richard’s dominance in the action of the play, there is that pervading sense that he too is caught in the roiling sea of life and in the ocean depths of his own unconscious urges.

Thus does Shakespeare turn this play, not only into Tudor propaganda that paints Richard III as a monster of history, but also into the transcendent tragedy of a character trapped in a catastrophe of his own making and in a universal human dilemma beyond his own making.

So what does Richard III tell us about the criminal mind?  It seems to suggest that destructive acts (both physical and verbal), assault, aggression, and abuse grow out of a deep-seated, unhealed wound.  Those who harm others have themselves been deeply hurt.*

*For the bulk of this commentary I am heavily indebted to my graduate school Shakespeare professor Dr. Gerald Chapman.  (Gerald Chapman, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Denver, scholar of Renaissance and 18th-century English studies, Department Chair for twelve years, has also taught at Northwestern, Harvard, and the University of Texas.)

Richard III as History

One need look no further than the Academy Award nominations of 2013 to note the controversy that often surrounds dramatizations of historical events and personages. I’ve seen Argo, Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty, even Lincoln questioned and debated as representations of history. 

In our postmodern world, we recognize that not even professional historians are completely neutral and objective in their accounts.  Why would we expect that of artists, playwrights, and film-makers?  Indeed, perhaps the value of historical dramatizations lies in their stimulation of interest and conversations about what we think we know about the past.

Similarly, real life events can spark interest in art.  I was fascinated by the recent unearthing of Richard III’s skeleton, which had lain undiscovered since 1485, not only by the archeological dig itself and the process of identifying the remains, but also by the efforts of the Richard III Society to rehabilitate his reputation after the damage done to it by previous historians and especially by William Shakespeare.  The news sent me back to the play, which I had studied in my graduate Shakespeare course, as well as to my undergraduate English history text and lecture notes.

I realized that, having both read the play and seen it in production, I had had my image of Richard shaped more by art and drama than by the historical record.  It was only when I reviewed my notes that I remembered my undergraduate history professor making the case that it was Henry VII, not Richard III, who had had the young princes murdered in the Tower.

Not only did I reread the play, but I reviewed the historical accounts.  Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, Vol. II, is particularly valuable since it compares the plot of Shakespeare’s play to what is known about the historical facts.  Shakespeare was clearly more interested in dramatic effect and the approval of the Tudor monarchy that ruled when he wrote the play than he was in historical truth.   Asimov makes a persuasive case that Richard probably did have the young princes murdered.  However, it’s clear from the historical record that it was Edward IV, not Richard, who had their brother, Clarence, murdered.  Asimov also argues that Richard’s ruthless acts to acquire and keep the kingship could be attributed as much to his desire to end the bloody civil wars that had been raging for decades as to his personal ambition.

In any case, while the newly discovered skeleton of Richard III confirms Shakespeare’s representation of him as a “hunchback” (he had curvature of the spine) there is no evidence that he had a withered arm or any other “deformities.”  Likewise, while the historical record shows Richard acting brutally, he was no more a “monster” than other contenders for the throne during the Wars of the Roses or other periods of British or other national histories.  There is also ample evidence that Henry VII, who succeeded Richard, and his Tudor descendants went to great lengths to create the legend of Richard as a brutal monster, both in his appearance and his deeds, who had grand ambition and little to no conscience.

Shakespeare contributed to this legend and added to Richard’s villainous image the traits of wit, irony, and “larger than life” character that marks most Shakespearean “heroes.”   What is fascinating is the way Shakespeare psychologizes the motivation of Richard’s character, such that the play becomes the study of a “criminal mind,” if you will, and of the steady decline deeper and deeper into corruption and blood, until his own treachery backfires and he himself becomes the victim of treason and violence.  (See next post.)

The examination of Richard’s skeleton showed that he had suffered wounds of humiliation after death, such as a thrust through the right buttock and missing feet.  Thus the Tudors and their followers demeaned his corpse as well as his reputation.

Whatever injustices art may inflict on history, at the very least it can engage and challenge us, not only in the drama but ultimately in the quest for truth.  We should never take any account, whether factual or fictional, at face value, but, rather, as the genesis of conversation, debate, and inquiry.  If art does not always represent the truth of history, it does energize us to seek that truth.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

As with “Rip Van Winkle” (see previous post), popular adaptations of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” often leave out the alternative explanations and the Postscript, which foreground the issue of fidelity in fiction. 

In the typical gothic romance the forces of irrational evil threaten the protagonist, who is either killed, driven insane, or barely allowed to escape.   Ichabod Crane’s fate is left ambiguous.

There were those who said that Ichabod Crane “had been carried away by the Galloping Hessian” or “spirited away by supernatural means.”  But “an old farmer, who had been down to New York…brought home the intelligence that Ichabod Crane was alive, that he had left the neighborhood, partly through fear of the goblin and…and partly in mortification at having been suddenly dismissed by the heiress.”  Brom Bones, we are told, “was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin; which led some to suspect that he knew more about the matter than he chose to tell.”

Popular versions of the tale often present Ichabod sympathetically as the innocent victim of the headless horseman (or sometimes of Brom Bones), but in the original he is a superstitious believer in witchcraft and a fortune hunter who shows more interest in Katrina Van Tassel’s wealth than either her character or person.  From the perspective of the urbane and rationalistic Irving, the story could represent the healthy (and manly?) world of Enlightenment reason (Brom Bones) overcoming the outdated world of Puritan supernaturalism (Ichabod Crane).

Irving’s “enlightened” world view does not seem to apply to gender.  Not only is Brom presented as more muscular and masculine than the cadaverous Crane (note the imagery of their names), but Ichabod is comically associated with “the old country wives,” with whom he likes to share stories of ghosts, goblins, and witchcraft.  And Katrina’s main function in the story is to be beautiful and rich.

As the bookish schoolmaster, Crane plays the role of nerd to Brom’s star athlete and Katrina’s prom queen.

For all the stereotyping, though, the tale raises serious questions about the nature of truth, the relationship between fact and fiction, and the function of storytelling.   Is truth to be found in supernaturalism, folklore, and oral traditions of myth and legend or in observable evidence and rational thought?  If there is truth to be found in the former, is it factual truth or symbolic?  The gothic romance may be factually impossible, but truthful in its symbolic representation of human fear, especially of the unknown, and the psychology of terror.  Irving’s version of the gothic tale seems to suggest that fear itself is the greatest enemy of the gullible. 

In his Postscript Irving seems to mock even the notion of symbolic truth to be found in romance.  The “story-teller” is asked what is “the moral of the story” and “what it went to prove.”  He responds with a nonsensical syllogism, as if to poke fun at the notion of a story having any point other than idle entertainment.  His interlocutor, who utterly misses the joke,  goes on  to opine “that he thought the story a little on  the extravagant—there were one or two points on which he had his doubts,” as if the story was to be taken as factual.  “’Faith, sir,’ replied the storyteller, ‘as to that matter, I don’t believe one half of it myself.’”  Thus Irving satirizes not only the seriousness of romance, but also those who confuse fact with fiction.

As with “Rip Van Winkle,” many of Irving’s readers, like the interlocutor in the Postscript, utterly miss the joke and read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” as a tale of terror rather than a mock romance.

At the same time, though the “story-teller” in the Postscript seems to dismiss the notion of any seriousness to be found in an entertaining tale, Irving’s story, read a certain way, seems to mock, not only romance, but the whole supernatural world-view, in favor of enlightened, scientific rationalism.

What Irving seems to miss is the possibility of “truth” being larger than mere “fact” and the value of romance, myth, legend, and fable as embodiments of larger truths about human experience, not just pointless tales for nothing more than idle entertainment.

Just as “Rip Van Winkle,” despite Irving’s mockery, conveys a universal story of human transformation, the loss of self, and its rediscovery, so “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” imparts a sense of universal karma, as Ichabod becomes the victim of his own irrational fears.  Unless you think he really was spirited away by the headless horseman, in which case the story expresses a timeless fear—our human fear of the unknown, a fear that even the sophisticated, urbane, and wholly rational Washington Irving probably experienced from time to time.

"Rip Van Winkle"

Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for his ambiguous fiction:  Will Robin “rise in the world” without help from his Kinsman Major Molineux? “Had Young Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting?”  Was it guilt, sorrow, or allegory that led Rev. Hooper to wear a black veil? Did Dimmesdale really confess to being the father of Pearl?  (See previous post on The Scarlet Letter, Oct. 2012)  However, the device of alternative explanations was not his invention. Hawthorne had to look no further than his own predecessor in American fiction, Washington Irving, perhaps our best early satirist.

Like Irving, Hawthorne was an ironist, but, unlike Irving, he was also a strong moralist.  Though a product of the Enlightenment, Hawthorne could not quite shake the influence of his Puritan upbringing.  Thus he was both a romanticist and a mock-romanticist.  Irving’s satire is more pronounced, but his famous sketches, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow“ (see next post) and “Rip Van Winkle” (1819/20) are more often adapted as straight gothic tales without much hint of satire.  The alternative explanations of Irving’s original versions are often left out.  The character of Rip Van Winkle, for example, usually emerges as a poor, hen-pecked husband, whose encounter with the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew playing nine pins in the Catskills conveniently and quite innocently saves him from the “yoke of matrimony” and “petticoat government.”  Irving’s references to those who winked and smirked at Van Winkle’s story and those who “insisted that Rip had been out of his head” are frequently omitted.

Based on German folktales, such as “Peter Klaus,” and the tradition of the magic mountain, Irving’s story, like the original, could also be read as a 19^th century update of an ancient mythic theme, that of identity, the loss of selfhood, and its rediscovery or reinvention.  Having slept for twenty years, Rip awakes to an unfamiliar world, no longer certain of who he is.  Conveniently, his “termagant wife” has died, and, reunited with his now married daughter, he is free to live out his days as a doting grandfather and village patriarch, spinning stories of olden days and, of course, his mountain adventure and long sleep.

Similarly, it fits the pattern of the gothic tale, as ordinary reality collides with an irrational world of ghosts, phantom bowlers on the mountain, a magic potion, and a twenty-year nap.  Part of Rip’s life is lost, but ultimately he escapes the burdens and pains of his previous life and is reborn, so to speak, into a new life of idleness and ease.

It is difficult to take the story too seriously, however, given the introduction, the Note, and the Postscript that Irving appends to the tale, in which he cites his source, Diedrich Knickerbocker, a “historian” who primarily researches local legends and reports them as “absolute fact.”  Irving acknowledges a possible source for “Rip Van Winkle” as the German “superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart, and the Kypphauser mountain,” but insists Knickerbocker is a reliable source for the truth of the story.  It is not hard to detect that Irving’s tongue is planted firmly in his cheek. 

The effect is to mock the naïve believers in myth, legend, folklore, and superstition and satirize “romance” as a literary style that allows too much license with reality and truth. 

Nevertheless, Irving is able to tap into the popular appeal of local fables and gothic tales to enhance his own literary reputation and line his own pockets, at the expense of the gullible and to the great entertainment of his more sophisticated, urbane, and enlightened readers.

Those more educated and rational readers would also have noticed the political allegory that Irving embeds in the story.  It seems that Rip has slept through the Revolutionary War.  The portrait of King George III at the local inn has been replaced by one of George Washington.  When Rip returns, not only is he free of Dame Van Winkle’s “petticoat government, “  but the country is free of British rule.  Rip is clueless of his own history but easily adjusts to his new life.  Allegorically, Rip stands for the American colonies and Dame Van Winkle for the British tyrant.  We could dismiss this as Irving’s 19^th century sexism: how ridiculous to compare a nagging wife, dependent for her well-being on an irresponsible husband, to King George III!  However, it is also possible that Irving is a Tory sympathizer, depicting the colonies as backward, clueless, gullible hicks, who had their freedom dumped in their laps, not really knowing what to do with it, and occupying themselves by telling fantastic tales of revolutionary glory.

Just as “Loyalists” and “Patriots” disagreed about British rule before the Revolution, they no doubt disagreed afterwards.  Thus while British sympathizers are enjoying Irving’s satire on newly independent Americans, patriotic Americans are delighting in the “heroic” story of Rip achieving his freedom from domestic oppression.  Similarly, while educated city-dwellers are appreciating the mockery of gullible rural folks, villagers and townspeople are enjoying a romantic fable.  And Irving benefits by receiving accolades from both audiences. 

Memory's Gate

The author of this 1989 novel, Greg Erickson, is a fellow congregant of mine at St. Cloud Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (http://www.uufstcloud.org/).  I’m looking forward to talking to him about it, but this blog post is being written with no input from him.  I’m hoping he’ll leave a comment, so my readers can see what he thinks of my reading of his book.

One thing I want to ask him is how he got the idea for the book.  He takes the religious idea of reincarnation and the romantic idea of a “soul mate,” combines them, literalizes them, and puts them into a realistic setting.  What if you could identify someone who shared your soul in a past life?  What if you could identify the person who, in this life, shares the soul of your previous identity’s soul mate?   That is what happens in Memory’s Gate.  It is almost enough to make you believe in reincarnation.  Well, maybe not, but it will definitely make you believe in imagination.  And Greg Erickson has plenty of that!

He also has the skill to construct a narrative that moves back and forth in time from the the life of Paul Weeres in the present day to his past life in the form of Michael McSwain in the 19^th century, not to mention the flashbacks during Weeres’ life.  The flashback is certainly an appropriate device to use for an exploration of past lives; however, all this time travel requires readers’ full attention lest they mix up, not only the time sequence in Weeres’ life, but also what happens to whom in both lives, especially since the two lives have several parallels.

Weeres goes along with a hypnotist at a dinner party, who, apparently by accident, regresses him to his past life as Michael McSwain.  Later, automatic writing appears on one of Weeres’ antique typewriters, eventually leading him to the elaborate scheme concocted by McSwain to contact, not only his soul in the next life, but also that of his first wife and soul mate.  The whole narrative is quite ingenious.

In addition to McSwain’s quest to contact the future and Weeres’ journey to understand reincarnation and contact the past, there is Weeres’ romantic quest for his soul mate, which is mostly a waiting game as he cycles through a wife and several lovers, both real and potential.

Erickson’s genius is to make all this reasonably credible.  According to reincarnation theory, nothing is a coincidence.  Even so, it was a bit of a stretch for me that the soul of McSwain’s second wife ends up in the body of his great-granddaughter, who becomes Weeres’ lover.  There’s also a pretty bizarre episode in which McSwain’s former housekeeper goes off the deep end and tries to murder his second wife in a knife attack.  For the most part, though, Erickson keeps the narrative on a pretty realistic and believable plane.

Nevertheless, there’s a gothic quality as the supernatural (and the violence) intersect with everyday reality.  Yet, the style evokes more curiosity and suspense than fear, and the protagonists emerge, not only relatively unscathed, but fulfilled. However gothic, the narrative does not play out in terms of mere escape from the irrational, but in terms of domestication of the irrational.  The seemingly irrational notion of reincarnation is tamed and incorporated into the realm of ordinary reality.

Similarly, if you accept the rational reality of reincarnation, then the romantic idea of a soul mate is perfectly sensible.  The only question is whether the two souls will find each other.  A lot depends on the suspension of disbelief.

What I found most fascinating, though, is the way reincarnation can stand in for the somewhat unorthodox religion that Erickson and I share, Unitarian Universalism.  I have no idea if it was intentional, but, knowing Greg, when I read of the suspicion, especially in the 19^th century setting, with which reincarnation was viewed, I could not help but think of how Unitarian Universalism today is often viewed as a questionable, fringy, if not cultish, belief system. 

Weeres, to some extent, but especially McSwain, must keep his belief in reincarnation secret, McSwain from 19^th century conservative Christians and Weeres from 20^th century rational skeptics.  Similarly, Unitarian Universalism is often viewed, at best, as a weird religion, and, at worst, as a form of devil worship.  When one considers that reincarnation would be viewed, at best, with skepticism, and, at worst, with contempt by most Unitarian Universalists today, the historical parallels and ironies compound.

One way to read this novel is simply as imaginative play.  And that’s enough right there.  It’s a fun read.  But you could also find, if you are so inclined, a message about enduring truths of human experience, truths about the quest for identity and lasting love, for example.  But there’s also a message about how social conformity and environmental pressures control our belief systems, and the tremendous effort it requires to resist those forces and pursue our own truth. 

I can’t wait to ask Greg what he thought he was doing in this novel!

Every Last One

Coincidentally, immediately after The Scent of Rain and Lightning (see previous post), I read another novel about an ordinary family experiencing extraordinary tragedy, Anna Quindlen’s Every Last One (2010).  This time I’m reminded of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People (1976), which I taught to college students in a course on gender issues in literature. 

Guest’s novel focuses on the aftereffects of the accidental drowning of the older son and attempted suicide of the younger one on an affluent, suburban family.  The traumatic events have already occurred when the novel begins, and we watch as the younger son travels his journey to health and healing, with the help of an able psychologist, and as his parents, particularly his mother, slowly unravel.  In The Scent of Rain and Lightning, we learn of the tragic events through a lengthy flashback.  The death of Jody’s parents thus occurs near the center of the novel.  Similarly, the tragic event of Every Last One occurs at almost the exact center of the novel, after 17 chapters on the everyday life of the Lathams, another affluent, suburban family.

During those 17 chapters there is a continuous sense of foreboding.  There is the middle school son suffering from depression, the teenage daughter who breaks up with her boyfriend (who doesn’t take it well), the stable but humdrum marriage, and the hint of previous infidelity, but nothing that really seems to justify the ominous air of impending doom.  Will there be a divorce? Suicide? Something worse? Something will happen, but what?  Nothing prepares us for the “something worse” that occurs to that family on what seems to be a typical New Year’s Eve, though the signs have been there all along.  I read those signs no better than the mother of the family, the ever-vigilant mother ceaselessly looking out for potential threats to the well-being of her family.

The last 16 chapters tell of the restoration of order, of health, of something approaching normal life, punctuated by mini-crises and transitions.

The novel is structured by the passing seasons and the annual events (high school prom, summer camp, Halloween, Christmas and New Year’s, high school graduation, summer camp, etc).  The primary sections are marked by three houses: the original family home, the transitional guest house of a friend, and the new house, where Mary Beth, the mother, seeks to build a new life.

On one level this is a story of motherhood, the process of maintaining the order, health, and happiness of the family.  Although Mary Beth runs her own landscaping business in the community, her primary focus is the caretaking of her family: keeping house for them, feeding them, surveilling them, disciplining them, creating opportunities for them, and supporting them.  At one point, late in the novel, she says that every fear is a fear of dying, “every last one,” and it has been her mission to keep disorder, illness, and death at bay.  It turns out that no amount of education, affluence, privilege, caretaking, or vigilance can ensure her success.  And so her mission must become learning to live with that knowledge.

As with all novels there are political messages if you look for them. For example:  with all our progress women still bear primary responsibility for domestic life and therefore the blame for its failures and oversights; or, while class privilege cannot protect you from tragedy, it can sure help insulate you as you pick up the pieces (friends with guest houses, prescription medication, life insurance, a generous inheritance, psychologists, grief counselors).   

Mary Beth can be seen as a social “victim” in one case and a beneficiary in the other.  Transcending her position in the matrix of social power, however, is the universal quest for order, health, and happiness in a world in which death is the universal end and the universal fear.

Kiernan, the boyfriend that the Latham’s daughter, Ruby, breaks up with the night of prom, had been a childhood friend, the son of a family who had once lived next door.  Their quest for order, health, and happiness had been derailed early, first by the drowning death of Kiernan’s younger brother in the backyard pool, then by divorce, and, then, apparently, by  the emotional instability of the mother, Deborah.

Much later, in Kiernan’s makeshift room is found a wall of photographs he has taken of Mary Beth’s family, especially of Ruby, with the words “Happy Families” spray painted over them.  This reference to the famous quote from Tolstoy in *Anna Karenina* is suggestive: “Happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  Whatever you think of the quote, Kiernan seems to prefer Ruby’s family to his own.  At least the Lathams are intact.

The quest for family happiness and the contrast between “happy” and “unhappy” families are central to the book.  Further, if the Lathams represent the “happy,” then Kiernan’s family represents, not only the “unhappy,” but also the shadow, or dark side, of the “happy” family. 

The two have been closely connected: they lived next door to each other, Deborah and Mary Beth were best friends, Kiernan and Ruby had been a “couple” almost from childhood, and, it turns out, Mary Beth had had a brief adulterous fling with Deborah’s husband.  Did Deborah know? Did Kiernan know?  The husband had been a serial adulterer, so when Deborah threw him out, it’s not clear how much she knew about all her husband’s partners.  Whether Deborah “knew” or not, Mary Beth’s own guilt might have weakened the friendship.   In any case, after the divorce Deborah and Kiernan move, and, while Kiernan continues to be a regular at the Latham home, Mary Beth’s friendship with Deborah wanes. 

Mary Beth’s affair, however brief, is one indication that all is not well in the “happy” Latham family.  And how much does her own family know about that?  If Kiernan knows, did he tell Ruby?  Does Mary Beth’s husband know?  Another sign is the tension between the Latham twin sons, one of whom is a successful athlete, who has lots of friends, unlike his brother, who is more of a loner with an artistic bent.  The latter son shows signs of depression and starts seeing a psychologist, who specializes in twins.  Then there is the break-up between Ruby and Kiernan, which seems to liberate Ruby, but devastates Kiernan, who keeps finding excuses to see Ruby and visit the family.

After that fateful New Year’s Eve, when the dark side erupts, Kiernan’s family is further destroyed, the Lathams are no longer “intact,” much less “happy,” and Deborah blames Mary Beth.   Was Tolstoy right, or is there only a thin line of difference between the two types of families, a line that can be crossed in an instant?

Is hope to be found in the contrast between the ways the two former friends respond to their respective tragedies?  When Deborah takes revenge by deliberately crashing into Mary Beth’s car multiple times in a parking lot, it does not bode well for her recovery.  Mary Beth, on the other hand, while, for the first time, setting a clear boundary between herself and Deborah, appears to be on the road to rebuilding her life and what’s left of her family, not that one ever fully recovers from the kind of tragedy she suffered.  At least, as she says at the end, she is “trying.”  

That may be the most redemption the novel offers in this sadly tragic tale.  There is more reason for hope, but that would give away too much to anyone interested in reading the book for themselves.  In any case, whatever hope we are left with is tempered by the knowledge that death is still the universal end and the universal fear for every last one of us.