Short Stories for Students : Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 1

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Short

for Students

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Table of Contents Quest Foreword ' 'An Adventure in Reading'' by Nancy Rosenberger

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Introduction

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Literary Chronology

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Acknowledgments

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Araby by James Joyce

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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain

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Children of the Sea by Edwidge Danticat

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The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving

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The Eatonville Anthology by Zora Neale Hurston

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The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen

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The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Katherine Anne Porter

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King of the Bingo Game b y Ralph Ellison

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The Lottery b y Shirley Jackson The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell

by Ray Bradbury

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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Gates 257

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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Oilman .

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Young Goodman Brown

The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad

There Will Come Soft Rains Through the Tunnel by Doris Lessing

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber

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The Open Window bySaki

by Ernest Hemingway

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by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Glossary of Literary Terms

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Cumulative Author/Title Index

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Nationality/Ethnicity Index

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Subject/Theme Index

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An Adventure in Reading Sitting on top of my desk is a Pueblo storytelling doll. Her legs stick straight out before her and around her neck and flowing down into her lap are wide-eyed children. Her mouth is open as though she were telling the Zuni tale of the young husband who followed his wife to the Land of the Dead, a story strangely like the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice, as both teach the dangers of youthful impatience. Although the Pueblo doll was created in New Mexico, she symbolizes a universal human activity. The pharaohs listened intently to tales of the goddess Isis, who traveled to foreign lands to rescue the dismembered body of her husband Osiris. Biblical narratives thrill the reader with stories like that of mortal combat between David and the giant Goliath. Greek and Roman myths immortalize the struggles of the wandering warriors Odysseus and Aeneas. In the Middle Ages, kings, queens and courtiers sat spellbound in drafty halls as troubadours sang of tragic lovers and pious pilgrims. Around the world and down through the ages, myths, folktales, and legends have spoken to us about the human condition and our place in the world of nature and of spirit. Despite its ancient beginnings, however, there is no rigid criteria to which a story must adhere. It is one of the most protean literary forms. Though many scholars credit the nineteenth-century Romantic writers Edgar

Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne with creating the modern short story, the form refuses to be frozen by a list of essential characteristics. Perhaps this is one of the reasons William Faulkner called it the "most demanding form after poetry.'' Jack London felt it should be ' 'concrete, to the point, with snap and go and life, crisp and crackling and interesting." Eudora Welty wrote that each story should reveal something new yet also contain something "as old as time." Below are some of the qualities you may observe as you explore the works discussed in Short Stories for Students. These characteristics also demonstrate some of the ways the short story differs from the novel: 1. Because time is compressed or accelerated, unity in plot, character development, tone, or mood is essential. 2. The author has chosen to focus on one character, event, or conflict within a limited time. 3. Poe wrote that careful craftsmanship serves unity by ensuring that every word must contribute to the story's design. 4. Poe also believed that reading should take place in one sitting so that the story's unity is not lost. 5. A character is revealed through a series of incidents or a conflict. The short story generally stops when it has achieved this purpose. A novel develops a character throughout its many chapters.

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Now that we have briefly explored the history of the short story and heard from a few of its creators, let us consider the role of the reader. Readers are not empty vessels that wait, lids raised, to receive a teacher's or a critic's interpretation. They bring their unique life experiences to the story. With these associations, the best readers also bring their attention (a word that means "leaning towards' '), their reading skills, and, most importantly, their imagination to a reading of a story. My students always challenged me to discuss, analyze, interpret, and evaluate the stories we read without destroying the thrill of being beamed up into another world. For years I grappled with one response after the other to this challenge. Then one day I read an article by a botanist who had explored the beauty of flowers by x-raying them. His illustrations showed the rose and the lily in their external beauty, and his x-rays presented the wonders of their construction. I brought the article to class, where we discussed the benefits of examining the internal design of flowers, relationships, current events, and short stories.

A short story, however, is not a fossil to admire. Readers must ask questions, guess at the answers, predict what will happen next, then read to discover. They and the author form a partnership that brings the story to life. Awareness of this partnership keeps the original excitement alive through discussion, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. Literary explorations allow the reader to admire the authors' craftsmanship as well as their artistry. In fact, original appreciation may be enhanced by this x-ray vision. The final step is to appreciate once again the story in its entirety—to put the pieces back together. Now it is your turn. Form a partnership with your author. During or following your adventure in reading, enter into a dialogue with the published scholars featured in Short Stories for Students. Through this dialogue with experts you will revise, enrich, and/or confirm your original observations and interpretations. During this adventure, I hope you will feel the same awe that illuminates the faces of the listeners that surround the neck of my Pueblo storyteller.

Nancy Rosenberger Conestoga High School Berwyn, Pennsylvania

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Introduction Purpose of the Book The purpose of Short Stories for Students (SSfS) is to provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying short stories by giving them easy access to information about the work. Part of Gale's "For Students" Literature line, SSfS is specifically designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers considering specific short fiction. While each volume contains entries on "classic" stories frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containing hard-to-find information on contemporary stories, including works by multicultural, international, and women writers. The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the story and the story's author; a plot summary, to help readers unravel and understand the events in the work; descriptions of important characters, including explanation of a given character's role in the narrative as well as discussion about that character's relationship to other characters in the story; analysis of important themes in the story; and an explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the work. In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the story itself, students are also provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each work.

This includes a historical context essay, a box comparing the time or place the story was written to modern Western culture, a critical overview essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the story or author. A unique feature of SSfS is a specially commissioned overview essay on each story by an academic expert, targeted toward the student reader. To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each story, information on media adaptations is provided, as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on the work.

Selection Criteria The titles for each volume of SSfS were selected by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Some of the sources surveyed include: literature anthologies, Reading Lists for CollegeBound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America's Top Colleges; Teaching the Short Story: A Guide to Using Stories from Around the World, by the National Council of Teachers of English (NTCE); and "A Study of High School Literature Anthologies," conducted by Arthur Applebee at the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

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Input was also solicited from our expert advisory board, as well as educators from various areas. From these discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of "classic" stories (those works commonly taught in literature classes) and contemporary stories for which information is often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was also placed on including works by international, multicultural, and women authors. Our advisory board members—current high-school teachers— helped pare down the list for each volume. Works not selected for the present volume were noted as possibilities for future volumes. As always, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.

How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry, or chapter, in SS/S focuses on one story. Each entry heading lists the title of the story, the author's name, and the date of the story's publication. The following elements are contained in each entry: Introduction: a brief overview of the story which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conflicts or themes within the work.

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rate subhead, and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in the Subject/Theme Index. Style: this section addresses important style elements of the story, such as setting, point of view, and narration; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary of Literary Terms. Historical and Cultural Context: This section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the work was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which the work was written. If the story is historical in nature, information regarding the time in which the story is set is also included. Long sections are broken down with helpful subheads.

Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the author's life, and focuses on events and times in the author's life that may have inspired the story in question.

Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the author and the story, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older works, this section may include a history of how story was first received and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for more recent works, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included.

Plot Summary: a description of the events in the story, with interpretation of how these events help articulate the story's themes.

Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material quoted in the entry, with bibliographical information.

Characters: an alphabetical listing of the characters who appear in the story. Each character name is followed by a brief to an extensive description of the character's role in the story, as well as discussion of the character's actions, relationships, and possible motivation.

For Further Study: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. Includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation. Criticism: an essay commissioned by SSfS which specifically deals with the story and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work.

Characters are listed alphabetically by last name. If a character is unnamed—for instance, the narrator in "The Eatonville Anthology"—the character is listed as ' 'The Narrator'' and alphabetized as ' 'Narrator." If a character's first name is the only one given, the name will appear alphabetically by that name.

In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, if applicable, set separate from the main text:

Themes: a thorough overview of how the topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the story. Each theme discussed appears in a sepa-

Media Adaptations: where applicable, a list of film and television adaptations of the story, including source information. The list also in-

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eludes stage adaptations, audio recordings, musical adaptations, etc.

available), maps, and/or photos of key historical events.

Compare and Contrast Box: an "at-a-glance" comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author's time and culture and late twentieth-century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the story was written, the time or place the story was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after the mid-1970s may not have this box.

When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of SSfS may use the following general forms to document their source. These examples are based on ML A style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, thus, the following examples may be adapted as needed.

What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might complement the featured story or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works of fiction and nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras. Study Questions: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the story. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc.

Other Features SSfS includes "An Adventure in Reading," a foreword by Nancy Rosenberger, chair of the English department at Conestoga High School in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. This essay provides an enlightening look at how readers interact with literature and how Short Stories for Students can help students enrich their own reading experiences. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the SSfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the SSfS series by nationality and ethnicity. A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface. Entries may include illustrations, including an author portrait, stills from film adaptations (when

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Citing Short Stories for Students

When citing text from SSfS that is not attributed to a particular author (for example, the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.) the following format may be used: ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 19-20.

When quoting the specially commissioned essay from SSfS (usually the first essay under the Criticism subhead), the following format may be used: Korb, Rena. Essay on "Children of the Sea." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 42.

When quoting a journal essay that is reprinted in a volume of Short Stories for Students, the following form may be used: Schmidt, Paul. "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler." The Southwest Review XLI, No. 3 (Summer, 1956), 270-77; excerpted and reprinted in Short Stories for Students, Vol. 1, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Detroit: Gale, 1997), pp. 29-31.

When quoting material from a book that is reprinted in a volume of SSfS, the following form may be used: Bell-Villada, Gene H. "The Master of Short Forms," in Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work (University of North Caroline Press, 1990); excerpted and reprinted in Short Stories for Students, Vol. 1, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Detroit: Gale, 1997), pp. 90-1.

We Welcome Your Suggestions The editor of Short Stories for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to suggest short stories to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may write to the editor at: Editor, Short Stories for Students Gale Research 835 Penobscot Bldg. 645 Griswold St. Detroit, MI 48226-4094

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Literary Chronology 1776: The signing of the Declaration of Independence signals the end of the American Revolution.

1860: Charlotte Perkins Oilman is born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3.

1783: Washington Irving is born in New York City on April 3.

1861: The U.S. Civil War begins when Confederate forces capture Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

1789: The French Revolution, marked by the violent Reign of Terror, shifts the balance of power in France.

1864: Nathaniel Hawthorne dies on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire, and is buried on May 23, 1864, at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, Massachusetts.

1804: Nathaniel Hawthorne is born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4. 1824: "The Devil and Tom Walker" by Washington Irving is published. 1835: "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne is published. 1835: Mark Twain is born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, to John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, in Florida, Missouri. 1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the story of a woman who must wear a scarlet letter "A" because she committed adultery, is published. 1857: Joseph Conrad is born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, to Apollo and Evelina Bobrowska Korzeniowski, near Berdichev in the Ukraine. 1859: Washington Irving dies on November 28.

1865: The U.S. Civil War ends; Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. 1865: "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain is published. 1870: Saki is born Hugh Hector Munro in Akyab, Burma, to British parents on December 18. 1882: James Joyce is born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2. 1884: Mark Twain establishes the Charles L. Webster Publishing Co. in order to secure greater control over his books. 1884: Mark Twain begins The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer's Comrade in the summer of 1876 while he is at Quarry Farm, near Elmira, New York, and finishes it in the summer of 1883. The novel is published February 18,1885. 1890: Katherine Anne Porter is born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, on May 15.

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1892:' 'The Yellow Wallpaper'' by Charlotte Perkins Oilman is published. 1893: Richard Connell is born in New York state on October 17. 1894: James Thurber is born in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8. 1899: Ernest Hemingway is born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. 1902: Joseph Conrad completes Heart of Darkness in February, 1899, and it is published in 1902. 1903: Zora Neale Hurston is born in Eatonville, Florida, on January 7, some sources say.

1920: Ray Bradbury is born on August 22,1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. 1922: James Joyce's Ulysses, considered by many to be the most important novel of the twentieth century, is published and quickly ignites a scandal for its unusual style and content. 1924: "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell is published.

1909: "The Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad is published.

1924: Joseph Conrad dies of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, at Oswalds, Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury. He is buried at Canterbury.

1910: Mark Twain dies of angina pectoris on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut.

1926: "The Eatonville Anthology" by Zora Neale Hurston is published.

1912: The

1928: Gabriel Garcia Marquez is born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia.

Titanic sinks on her maiden voyage.

1913: Tillie Olsen is born is born in Omaha, Nebraska, on January 14, some sources say. 1914: Ralph Ellison is born March 1, 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 1914: With the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, long-festering tensions in Europe erupt into the what becomes known as the Great War. 1914: "Araby" by James Joyce is published in the collection Dubliners after years of disputes with editors and publishers. 1914: "The Open Window" by Saki is published. 1916: Saki dies in the trenches of France during battle on November 14.

1929: The stock market crash in October signals the beginning of a worldwide economic depression. 1929: ' 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'' by Katherine Anne Porter is published. 1929: Ernest Hemingway's^ Farewell to Arms, the story of an American ambulance driver and his desire for an English nurse during World War I, is published. 1935: Charlotte Perkins Oilman commits suicide after being diagnosed with a terminal illness on August 17. 1936:' "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber'' by Ernest Hemingway is published.

1918: World War I, the most deadly war in history, ends with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

1937: Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of Zora Neale Hurston's most acclaimed works, is published,

1918: Willa Gather's My Antonia, her novel about prairie life, is published.

1938: Joyce Carol Gates is born in Millersport, New York, on June 16.

1919: Shirley Jackson is born in San Francisco, California, on December 14.

1939: World War II begins when Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, invades Poland; England and France declare war in response.

1919: Doris Lessing is born in Kermansha, Persia, on October 22, of British parents. 1920: The 18th Amendment, outlawing the sale, manufacture, or transportation of alcohol— known as Prohibition—goes into effect. This law led to the creation of "speakeasies"—ille-

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gal bars—and an increase in organized crime, both reflected in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby. Prohibition is eventually repealed in 1933.

1939: ' 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'' by James Thurber is published. 1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway is published. The book proves to be one of his most popular novels.

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1941: James Joyce dies in Zurich, Switzerland, on January 13.

1962: Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter's most famous work, is published.

1944: "King of the Bingo Game" by Ralph Ellison is published.

1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22.

1945: World War II ends in August with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. 1948:' 'The Lottery'' by Shirley Jackson is published. 1949: Richard Connell dies of a heart attack in Beverly Hills, California, on November 22. 1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin sets off the "Red Scare" that leads to government hearings and blacklisting of suspected communists. 1951: "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury is published. 1952: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is published. 1953: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man wins the National Book Award, which honors American books of the highest literary merit. 1953: Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's first novel, an expanded version of an earlier story, is published. 1954: Ernest Hemingway receives the Nobel Prize in Literature. 1955: "Through the Tunnel" by Doris Lessing is published. 1960: Zora Neale Hurston dies in Florida on January 28.

1965: Shirley Jackson dies of heart failure on August 8. 1966: ' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Gates is published. 1967: "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is first published in English. 1969: Edwidge Danticat is born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 19. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the moon on July 21. 1969: them, an award-winning novel by Joyce Carol Gates, is published. 1970: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is published in English. 1972: President Nixon resigns following the Watergate scandal. 1980: Katherine Anne Porter dies in College Park, Maryland, on September 18. 1982: Gabriel Garcia Marquez receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

1961: Ernest Hemingway commits suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

1990: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost results in the fracturing of the Iron Curtain. By December the Soviet flag is lowered from the Kremlin.

1961: "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olsen is published.

1993: "Children of the Sea" by Edwidge Danticat is published.

1962: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing is published.

1994: Ralph Ellison dies of cancer on April 16, 1994, in New York City.

1961: James Thurber dies on November 2.

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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of SSFS. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN SSFS, VOLUME 1, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: American Literature, v. XXVIII, November, 1956. Copyright © 1956 Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Reproduced with permission.—The Antioch Review, v. XXV, Fall, 1965. Copyright © 1965 by The Antioch Review Inc. Reproduced by permission of the Editors.—Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, v. 10, Summer, 1995. Reproduced by permission.—The Boston Globe, July 19,1995. © 1995 Globe Newspaper Co. Reproduced courtesy of The Boston Globe,— CLA Journal, v. XX, September, 1976; v. XXXVII, June, 1994. Copyright 1976, 1994 by The College Lan-

guage Association. Both used by permission of The College Language Association.—College English, v. 23, May, 1962 for ' 'Point of View in The Secret Sharer' " by Charles G. Hoffmann. Copyright © 1967 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Conradiana, v. XVIII, 1986 for "Shared Secret or Secret Sharing in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer' " by Mary Ann Dazey. Reproduced with permission of Texas Tech University Press and the author.—Doris Lessing Newsletter, v. 9, Spring, 1985. © 1985 by Brooklyn College, The City University of New York. Reproduced by permission.—English Journal, v. 56, December, 1967 for "The Architecture of Walter Mitty's Secret Life" by Carl Sundell. Copyright© 1967 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Essays in Literature, v. XV, Fall, 1988. Copyright 1988 by Western Illinois University. Reproduced by permission.—The Explicator, v. XII, March, 1954; v. 32, May, 1974; v. 42, Summer, 1984; v. 48, Summer, 1990. Copyright 1954, 1974, 1984, 1990 by Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. All reproduced with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802.—The Georgia Review, v. XXVIII, Summer, 1974. Copyright, 1974, by the University of Georgia. Reproduced by permission.—The Hemingway Review, v. II, Spring,

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1983; v. XI, Fall, 1991. Copyright 1983, 1991 by The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Both reproduced by permission of the publisher.—James Joyce Quarterly, v. 7, Summer, 1970. Copyright, 1970, The University of Tulsa. Reproduced by permission.—Journal of American Culture, v. 15, Summer, 1992.Copyright© 1992 by Ray B.Browne. Reproduced by permission.—The Journal of General Education, v. 28, Spring, 1976. Copyright 1976 by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA. Reproduced by permission.— The Journal of Narrative Technique, v. 5, January, 1975 for " 'Don't You Know Who I Am': The Grotesque in Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' " Copyright ©1975 by The Journal of Narrative Technique. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Kentucky Romance Quarterly, v. 26,1979. Copyright © 1979 Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. Reproduced with permission of the Helen D wight Reid Educational Foundation, published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802.—Literature/Film Quarterly, v. 10, 1982. Reproduced by permission.—Mark Twain Journal, v. XX, Winter, 1979-80. Reproduced by permission.—MELUS, v. 12, Fall, 1985. Copyright, MELUS, The Society for the Study of MultiEthnic Literature of the United States, 1985. Reproduced by permission.—The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, 1973 for "The Woe That Is Madness: Goodman Brown and the Face of the Fire" by RobertE. Morsberger. Copyright© 1973 by Bruccoli Clark Publishers, Inc. Reproduced by permission of the author.—New York Folklore Quarterly, v. XXIV, December, 1968. Copyright 1968 by the New York Folklore Society. Reproduced by permission.—Renascence, v. XXI, Autumn, 1968. © copyright 1968, Marquette University Press. Reproduced by permission.—The Southern Literary Journal, v. 25, Spring, 1994. Copyright 1994 by the Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reproduced by permission.— Southwest Review, v. XLI, Summer, 1956. © 1956 Southern Methodist University. Reproduced by permission.—Studies in Short Fiction, \. 18, Summer, 1981; v. 22, Spring, 1985; v. 26, Fall, 1989. Copyright 1981, 1985, 1989 by Newberry College. All reproduced by permission.—The USF Language Quarterly, v. XV, Spring-Summer, 1977. Reproduced by permission COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN SSFS, VOLUME 1, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:

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Bell-Villada, Gene H. From Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work. The University of North CarolinaPress, 1990.© 1990The University ofNorth Carolina Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.—Bus, Heiner. From ' 'The Establishment of Community in Zora Neale Hurston's 'The Eatonville Anthology' (1926) and Roland Hinojosa's 'Estampas del vallee' (1973)," in European Perspective on Hispanic Literature of the United States. Edited by Genvieve Fabre. Arte Publico Press, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by Arte Publico Press. Reproduced by permission.—Jackson, Shirley. From "Biography of a Story," in Come Along with Me. Edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman. VikingPress, 1968. Copyright 1948,1952, © 1960 by Shirley Jackson. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of Shirley Jackson. In North America and the Philippines by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.—Wagner-Martin, Linda. From "Oilman's The Yellow Wallpaper': A Centenary," in Charlotte Perkins Oilman: The Woman and Her Work. Edited by Sheryl L Meyering. UMI Research Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 Sheryl L. Meyering. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author. PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS APPEARING IN SSFS, VOLUME 1, WERE RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES: Bingo game, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission. Bradbury, Ray, photograph. Archive Photos, Inc. Reproduced by permission. Clemens, Samuel, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Conrad, Joseph, photograph. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission. Danticat, Edwidge, photograph. Copyright © 1994 Nancy Crampton. Reproduced by permission. Ellison, Ralph, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Oilman, Charlotte Perkins, portrait. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Reproduced by permission. The Scarlet Letter, movie still. M-G-M. Courtesy of the Kobal Collection. Reproduced by permission. Haitian refugees, photograph. AP/Wide World Inc. Reproduced by permission. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, photograph. The Library of Congress. Hemingway, Ernest, photograph by A. E. Hotchner. Reproduced by permission. Hemingway, Ernest, photograph. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission. Hurston,

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Zora Neale, photograph by Carl Van Vechten. The Library of Congress. Jackson, Shirley, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Joyce, James, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, photograph. Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, movie still. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission. Lessing, Doris, photograph. © Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.

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The Most Dangerous Game In the World, photograph. Springer/Corbis-Bettmann Film Archive. Reproduced by permission. Olsen, Tillie, photograph by Miriam Berkley. Photo © Miriam Berkley. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. Porter, Katherine Anne, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission. Smooth Talk, movie still. Archive Photos. Reproduced by permission. Thurber, James, photograph. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.

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Araby ' 'Araby'' is one of fifteen short stories that together make up James Joyce's collection, Dubliners. Although Joyce wrote the stories between 1904 and 1906, they were not published until 1914. Dubliners paints a portrait of life in Dublin, Ireland, at the turn of the twentieth century. Its stories are arranged in an order reflecting the development of a child into a grown man. The first three stories are told from the point of view of a young boy, the next three from the point of view of an adolescent, and so on. "Araby" is the last story of the first set, and is told from the perspective of a boy just on the verge of adolescence. The story takes its title from a real festival which came to Dublin in 1894 when Joyce was twelve years old.

James Joyce

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Joyce is one of the most famous writers of the Modernist period of literature, which runs roughly from 1900 to the end of World War II. Modernist works often include characters who are spiritually lost and themes that reflect a cynicism toward institutions the writer had been taught to respect, such as government and religion. Much of the literature of this period is experimental; Joyce's writing reflects this in the use of dashes instead of quotation marks to indicate that a character is speaking. Joyce had a very difficult time getting Dubliners published. It took him over ten years to find a publisher who was willing to risk publishing the stories because of their unconventional style and

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themes. Once he found a publisher, he fought very hard with the editors to keep the stories the way he had written them. Years later, these stories are heralded not only for their portrayal of life in Dublin at the turn of the century, but also as the beginning of the career of one of the most brilliant Englishlanguage writers of the twentieth century.

Author Biography James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, the oldest often children born to John and Mary Joyce. Joyce's father, even though he was a good-natured man, was a drinker who wasted the family's resources. The Joyce family moved constantly, and Joyce became familiar with the sight of a pawnbroker's redemption slips and eviction notices. In spite of his family's lack of money, Joyce was sent to Clongowes Wood College—a Jesuit Catholic boarding school—when he was six years old. Upon arrival, Joyce was asked his age, to which he replied, "Half-past six," which became his nickname for the rest of that year. Later, he went to another Jesuit school, Belvedere College, where he began to show his brilliance as a writer, winning several national competitions. Joyce spent the money he received from these competitions very quickly, celebrating with his large family at dinners in restaurants and redeeming some of his mother's possessions from the pawnbroker. Joyce was always painfully aware that he, being the oldest son, was given a good education and other privileges that his younger brothers and sisters could not receive. When Joyce went to University College in Dublin, he began to rebel against his Catholic upbringing. Although successful in academic life, he found the unsophisticated narrowness of Irish politics and the arts stifling. After graduation, he met Nora Barnacle from Galway, Ireland, who would become his lifelong companion. Joyce was opposed to the institution of marriage, and he knew that he and Nora could not live together in Dublin without being married. So, after his mother's death in 1904, Joyce and Nora left Ireland to live the rest of their lives in continental Europe: first in Pola, in the former Yugoslavia; then Trieste, Italy, where their children Giorgio and Lucia were born; then Zurich, Switzerland, during the First World War; and finally, Paris. It was only after he left Ireland that Joyce was able to begin writing about his native

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country, and the stories in Dubliners, including "Araby," were written in his first years away, although they were not published until 1914. During these years on the continent, Joyce supported his family by teaching English and holding a variety of other jobs, including managing an English theater troupe and working at a bank. He continued to write, but experienced only scattered commercial success. With the publication of his novel Ulysses in 1922, however, he reached a level of financial stability that enabled him to begin writing full-time. In the following years, his already poor eyesight got progressively worse, and he underwent several eye operations. Also during this period, Joyce's daughter suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in a sanitarium in Zurich. In 1931, after 27 years of living together, Joyce and Nora were finally married. They were afraid that after Joyce died, Nora would be left with no rights to his estate. Joyce died on January 13, 1941, following surgery for an ulcer. He was 58 years old.

Plot Summary "Araby" opens on North Richmond street in Dublin, where "an uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground." The narrator, who remains unnamed throughout the story, lives with his aunt and uncle. He describes his block, then discusses the former tenant who lived in his house: a priest who recently died in the back room. This priest has a library that attracts the young narrator, and he is particularly interested in three titles: a Sir Walter Scott romance, a religious tract, and a police agent's memoirs. The narrator talks about being a part of the group of boys who play in the street. He then introduces Mangan's sister, a girl who captivates his imagination even though he rarely, if ever, speaks with her. He does stare at her from his window and follow her on the street, however, often thinking of her ' 'even in places the most hostile to romance." While in the marketplace on Saturday nights, for example, he uses her image to guide him through the thronging crowd who yell their sales pitches and sing patriotic Irish ballads. He becomes misty-eyed just at the thought of her and retreats to the priest's dark room in order to deprive himself of other senses and think only of her.

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Finally, Mangan's sister speaks to him. She asks if he will be attending a church-sponsored fair that is coming soon to Dublin—a bazaar called Araby. He is tongue-tied and cannot answer, but when she tells him that she cannot go because of a retreat that week in her convent, he promises to go and bring her a gift from the bazaar. From then on he can only think of the time when he will be at the fair; he is haunted by ' 'the syllables of the word Araby.'' On the night he is supposed to attend the fair, his uncle is late returning home and he must wait to get money from him. He gets very anxious, and his aunt tells him that he may have to miss the bazaar, but his uncle does come home, apologetic that he had forgotten. After asking the boy if he knows a poem entitled "The Arab's Farewell to His Steed," the uncle bids the boy farewell. The boy takes a coin from his uncle and catches a train to the fair. Araby is closing down as he arrives and he timidly walks through the center of the bazaar. As he looks at the few stalls that are still open, he overhears a conversation between an English shop-girl and two young men. Their talk is nothing but idle gossip. The shop-girl pauses reluctantly to ask the boy if he wishes to buy anything, but he declines. As he walks slowly out of the hall amid the darkening of the lights, he thinks that he is a "creature driven and derided by vanity" and his "eyes burned with anguish and anger."

James Joyce

hand the narrator describes her romantically, he also describes her in reverential terms which call to mind the Virgin Mary. This dual image description of Mangan' s sister represents the religious and romantic confusion of the narrator.

Characters Mrs. Mercer Mangan Mangan is the same age and in the same class at the Christian Brothers school as the narrator, and so he and the narrator often play together after school. His older sister is the object of the narrator's confused feelings.

Mrs. Mercer is the pawnbroker's widow who waits at the house for the narrator's uncle, perhaps to collect money that he owes her. Joyce includes her character to show that the uncle is unreliable in the payment of his debts.

Narrator Mangan's Sister Mangan is one of the narrator's chums who lives down the street. His older sister becomes the object of the narrator's schoolboy crush. Mangan's sister has no idea how the narrator feels about her, however, so when they discuss Araby, the bazaar coming to town, she is only being polite and friendly. She says she would like to go to the bazaar but cannot because she has to attend a school retreat that weekend. The narrator promises to buy her something at the bazaar if he goes, but it is unlikely that she takes this promise seriously. While on the one

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The narrator of this story is a young, sensitive boy who confuses a romantic crush and religious enthusiasm. All of the conflict in this story happens inside his mind. It is unlikely that the object of his crush, Mangan's sister, is aware of his feelings for her, nor is anybody else in this boy's small world. B ecause the boy' s thoughts only reveal a part of the story, a careful reader must put together clues that the author gives. For example, the narrator mentions that the former tenant of the house he shares with his aunt and uncle was a priest, a representative of the Catholic church, who left behind three books which

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Media Adaptations The Dead, a film based on one of the stories in Dubliners, was directed by John Huston (starring his daughter, Anjelica) and produced by Vestron Pictures in 1987.

became important to the narrator. One is a romantic adventure by Sir Walter Scott; one is a religious pamphlet written by a Protestant; and the third is the exciting memoirs of a French policeman and master of disguise. These three books are not what a person would expect a Catholic priest to have in his library. So if this priest has non-religious literature in his library, then how devout can an average churchgoer be expected to be? This turns out to be the case for the narrator, who confuses religious idealism with romance. The boy confuses the religious and secular worlds when he describes himself at the market with his aunt. He bears the chalice—the Communion cup—through a "throng of foes." He also describes Mangan's sister in terms often associated with the Virgin Mary. For the narrator, then, an ordinary grocery-shopping trip becomes a religious crusade, and a pretty girl down the street becomes a substitute for the Mother of God. The boy fuses together religious devotion for the Virgin Mary with his own romantic longing. Joyce is famous for creating characters who undergo an epiphany—a sudden moment of insight—and the narrator of "Araby" is one of his best examples. At the end of the story, the boy overhears a trite conversation between an English girl working at the bazaar and two young men, and he suddenly realizes that he has been confusing things. It dawns on him that the bazaar, which he thought would be so exotic and exciting, is really only a commercialized place to buy things. Furthermore, he now realizes that Mangan's sister is just a girl who will not care whether he fulfills his promise to buy her something at the bazaar. His conversation with Mangan's sister, during which he promised he

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would buy her something, was really only small talk—as meaningless as the one between the English girl and her companions. He leaves Araby feeling ashamed and upset. This epiphany signals a change in the narrator—from an innocent, idealistic boy to an adolescent dealing with harsh realities.

Narrator's Aunt The narrator's aunt, who is a mother figure in the story, takes the narrator with her to do the marketing. When it seems as though the uncle has forgotten his promise to the narrator that he could go to the bazaar, she warns the boy that he may have to ' 'put off' the bazaar ' 'for this night of Our Lord.'' While this statement makes her seem strict in a religious sense, she also exhibits empathy for the boy's plight. She pleads his case when the uncle forgets about the boy's plans to go to Araby.

Narrator's Uncle The narrator's uncle seems self-centered and very unreliable. When the narrator reminds him that he wants to go to the bazaar, he replies,' 'Yes, boy, I know." But on the Saturday evening of the bazaar, he has forgotten, which causes the narrator to arrive at the bazaar very late. When the uncle finally shows up, he has been drinking, and as the boy leaves for the bazaar he begins reciting the opening lines of the poem, "The Arab's Farewell to his Steed." Joyce's characterization of the uncle bears resemblance to his own father, who liked to drink and was often in debt. Joyce's inclusion of Mrs. Mercer, the pawnbroker's widow who waits for the uncle to return, suggests that the uncle owes money.

Themes A sensitive boy confuses a romantic crush and religious enthusiasm. He goes to Araby, a bazaar with an exotic, Oriental theme, in order to buy a souvenir for the object of his crush. The boy arrives late, however, and when he overhears a shallow conversation a female clerk is having with her male friends and sees the bazaar is closing down, he realizes that he has allowed his imagination to carry him away. He leaves without a souvenir, feeling foolish and angry with himself.

Alienation and Loneliness The narrator never shares any of his feelings concerning Mangan's sister with anyone. He iso-

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lates himself from his friends, who seem terribly young to him once his crush begins, and from his family, who seem caught up in their own world. Mangan's sister is also completely unaware of the narrator's feelings for her. Consequently, when he suddenly realizes how foolish he has been, his anger at himself is intensified by his alienation from everyone and the resulting feeling of isolation.

Change and Transformation The narrator experiences emotional growth— changing from an innocent young boy to a disillusioned adolescent—in the flash of an instant. This insight occurs through what Joyce called an ' 'epiphany," which is a moment of intense insight and selfunderstanding. Although the narrator suddenly understands that he has allowed his feelings to get carried away, this understanding makes him neither happy nor satisfied. If anything, he is very angry at himself for acting foolishly. This realization marks the beginning of his maturation from a child into an adult.

God and Religion At the beginning of the story, the narrator sees himself as a religious hero and sees Mangan's sister as the living embodiment of the Virgin Mary. He has not yet learned how to separate the religious teachings of his school with the reality of his secular life. Part of his understanding at the end of the story involves his finally separating those two aspects of his life. He realizes that the church-sponsored bazaar is just a place to buy trinkets, that Mangan's sister is just a girl, and that he. himself is justaboy. It is not clear at the end of the story what impact the narrator's epiphany will have on his religious beliefs. Joyce's own disillusionment with Catholicism, however, lends credence to the possibility of the boy adopting a cynical attitude toward his religion.

Style Through the use of a first person narrative, Joyce communicates the confused thoughts and dreams of his young male protagonist. Joyce uses this familiarity with the narrator's feelings to evoke in readers a response similar to the boy's "epiphany"—a sudden moment of insight and understanding—at the turning point of the story.

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Topics for Further Study Joyce once said that in Dubliners he intended "to write a chapter of the moral history of Ireland, because Dublin seemed to him to be at the "centre of paralysis." What do you think he meant by that? If you were to write a chapter of the moral history of your country, which city would you choose to be at the center? Why? A recurring theme in many of the stories in Dubliners is a longing for escape expressed through fantasies of flight to someplace Eastern and exotic. What place represents the unknown to you? Research this place and discuss whether it is truly exotic and mysterious or just different. Catholicism figures prominently in much of Joyce's work. Compare the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland at the turn of the century and today. Would the themes of religious confusion and doubt in "Araby" create controversy in modern-day Ireland?

Point of View The first-person point of view in "Araby" means that readers see everything through the eyes of the narrator and know what he feels and thinks. If the narrator is confused about his feelings, then it is up to the readers to figure out how the narrator really feels and why he feels that way, using only the clues given by the author. For example, when the narrator first describes Mangan's sister, he says that "her figure [is] defined by the light from the half-opened door.'' In other words, she is lit from behind, giving her an unearthly "glow," like an angel or supernatural being such as the Virgin Mary. Readers are left to interpret the meaning behind the narrator's words, because the boy is not sophisticated enough to understand his own longings.

Symbolism The symbolism Joyce includes also helps readers to fully understand all of the story's complexities. The former tenant of the narrator's house, the

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Catholic priest, could be said to represent the entire Catholic church. By extension, the books left in his room—which include non-religious and nonCatholic reading—represent a feeling of ambiguity toward religion in general and Catholicism in particular. The bazaar, Araby, represents the East—a part of the world that is exotic and mysterious to the Irish boy. It could also represent commercialism, since it is really just a fundraiser used to get people to spend money on the church. Mrs. Mercer, the pawnbroker's widow, represents the uncle's debt and irresponsibility; she too could represent greed and materialism. To the narrator, Mangan's sister is a symbol of purity and feminine perfection. These qualities are often associated with the Virgin Mary, who also symbolizes the Catholic church. While the boy is at Araby, the various, and often contrasting, meanings of these symbols converge to produce his epiphany.

Stream of Consciousness Joyce is famous for using a stream-of-consciousness technique for storytelling. Although stream of consciousness does not figure prominently in "Araby," a reader can see the beginnings of Joyce's use of this technique, which he used extensively in his subsequent novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A major feature of stream-ofconsciousness storytelling is that the narration takes place inside the mind of main characters and follows their thoughts as they occur to them, whether those thoughts are complete sentences or not. Although this story uses complete sentences for its storytelling, the narration takes place inside the boy's mind. Another feature of stream-of-consciousness narration is that the narrator's thoughts are not explained for the reader. This is true of "Araby" as well, especially during and after the boy's epiphany.

Historical Context While Dublin, Ireland, has seen change since the turn of the twentieth century, when Joyce wrote "Araby," many of the conditions present then remain today. In 1904, all of Ireland was under British control, which the Irish resented bitterly. The nationalist group, Sinn Fein (part of which later became the Irish Republican Army—the IRA), had not yet formed, but Irish politics were nonetheless vibrant and controversial. The question of Irish

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independence from Britain was one of primary importance to every citizen. Ireland's major religion, Roman Catholicism, dominated Irish culture. Many families sent their children to schools run by Jesuit priests (like the one the narrator in ' 'Araby'' attends) and convent schools run by nuns (like the one Mangan's sister attends). Folklore, fairy tales, and homespun stories—told and retold for generations—provided a common form of family entertainment. Many turn-of-thecentury stereotypes about the Irish came from their cultural traditions. Some common ones included large families, drunkenness, poverty, and imaginative storytelling. The large families seen in Ireland at the turn of the century stemmed largely from the Catholic religion. Divorce went against church doctrine, and abortion and birth control were considered mortal sins. It was also a mortal sin for husbands and wives to refuse to engage in sexual relations to prevent having more children. As a consequence, it was not unusual for Irish Catholic families at the turn of the century to be quite large. While the modern Catholic church does not exercise quite as much influence, these issues still figure strongly in Irish culture today. There were no televisions or radios for entertainment at the turn of the century. Many homes had no electricity and were heated only by a central fireplace. Therefore, the custom of story telling after dinner (or "tea") was one common form of entertainment. In light of these living conditions, it is clear why an event like the bazaar in "Araby" could cause such great expectations. The stereotype of the drunken Irishman arose partly in response to the poverty experienced by the majority of people in Ireland after the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s. Beer was cheap and often more sanitary than the water. The Irish were also famous for their whiskey, which many still claim to be the finest in the world. The local public house— or pub—was the central gathering place of the village, and also served as a small hotel for weary travelers. People were certain to find warm hospitality, good beer and mutton stew, and good stories around the hearth to lift their spirits there. In the evening, the men would gather at the pub to drink, talk of politics or sports, and hear music. Unfortunately, this led to many men wasting their families's meager resources, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of the drunk, irresponsible Irishman. The narrator's uncle in "Araby," who keeps the narrator

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and the pawnbroker's widow waiting before coming home drunk, fits this mold. In larger cities like Dublin and Belfast, many Irish cultural stereotypes have disappeared as Ireland has become modernized. In many parts of Ireland, though, poverty still exists and the pub is still the town's social center.

Critical Overview Joyce had a hard time getting Dubliners published. Although he wrote the stories between 1904 and 1906, and some of them were published in magazines, the entire collection was not published in book form until 1914. The book was first accepted for publication by the Grant Richards publishing company in 1906, but after a long controversy and many arguments between Joyce and the editors over changes the company wanted to make to the stories, they withdrew their offer to publish. The second company that accepted the manuscript for publication in 1909 was Maunsel and Company, a Dublin publisher. This company had second thoughts about publishing the work as well, and in 1912 they destroyed the proofs that Joyce had corrected. This left Joyce extremely bitter. Finally, in 1914, Grant Richards, the company that originally accepted the manuscript for publication again agreed to publish Joyce's work. This troubled road to publication influenced the early reviews and criticism of Dubliners. According to Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, the editors of the 1996 edition of Dubliners published by Viking Press, these stories were mostly dismissed by early critics as Joyce's "apprentice" work, or given a secondary place as "skillful but depressing 'slices' of Dublin life." Dubliners was published four months after the publication of Joyce's next work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Its reception was overshadowed by excitement and attention given to both Portrait and early chapters of Ulysses, which Joyce was publishing in magazines around the same time. Many readers during this time found Portrait —a revealing story of a troubled young man searching for his place in life—far more interesting than the stories in Dubliners. For many years Joyce's prob-

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Front cover of the Araby festival program.

lems with publishers and printers were discussed more frequently than the stories themselves. Early reviews of Dubliners set the pattern for subsequent critical discussion. Many critics protested against the sordid incidents related in some of the stories and the overall pessimistic tone of the collection. These critics complained that these stories lacked a "point," and that they were merely anecdotes or sketches without any definite structure. At least two reviewers found the longer stories the least satisfactory because Joyce did not sustain a "mood" in them as he did in the shorter pieces. The turning point in Dubliners criticism came in the 1940s and 1950s, when critics began to find in Joyce's work interesting and novel connections between such elements as tone, atmosphere and action. While some critics still focus on these stories as evidence of the young Joyce developing his distinctive style, or emphasize that Joyce provides a truthful, skillful depiction of life in Dublin at the turn of the century, the criticism now encompasses a wide range of interpretations and appreciation. Most critics now agree that Dubliners stands on its own merits as a great work by one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

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his work have become common currency in English literature. In "Araby," a story of a young boy's disillusionment, Joyce explores questions of nationality, religion, popular culture, art, and relationships between the sexes. None of these themes can be adequately explored in a short essay; however, a brief exposition of the most important themes of "Araby" indicates the marvelous complexity of Joyce's insight.

Back cover of the Araby festival program.

Criticism Greg Barnhisel Greg Barnhisel is an educator and Assistant Director of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, he explores the major themes in ' 'Araby,'' including nationality, religion, and relationships between the sexes. In his early story "Araby," James Joyce prefigures many, if not all, of the themes which later became the focus of his writing. Joyce, often considered the greatest English-language novelist of the twentieth century, published few books in his lifetime. Chamber Music, a book of poems, appeared in 1907; Dubliners, a collection of short stories from which "Araby" is taken, was published in 1914; and hi first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, came out in the same year. The book for which Joyce is most famous, Ulysses, appeared in 192 and was quickly banned. Finally, in 1939, Joyce published Finnegans Wake. Notwithstanding his small output, Joyce's work has been highly influential, and many of the themes and details he uses in

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"Araby" is narrated by a young boy who is, like most of Joyce's characters, a native of Dublin, Ireland. Since the conflict in the story occurs primarily within the boy's consciousness, Joyce's choice of first-person narration is crucial. The protagonist, as with most of Joyce's main characters, is a sensitive boy, searching for principles with which to make sense of the chaos and banality of the world. We know immediately that Catholicism has served as one of these principles; he attends a Christian Brothers school and at home is attracted to the library of a former tenant of his family, a priest. His identification with Catholicism is more than casual. On Saturday evenings, when the boy goes ' 'marketing' ' with his aunt he sees the crowds in the market as a ' 'throng of foes" and himself as a religious hero who "bears his chalice" through the crowd. The narrator's dedication to Catholicism, however, does not run as deep as he might believe. In fact, he channels the emotional devotion that his religion requires towards questionable recipients. Readers learn first that the priest's library contains three books especially important to the protagonist: a romantic novel, a religious tract written by a Protestant, and the memoirs of a French police agent and master of disguise. If this priest does not maintain a sufficiently pious library, how can this boy be expected to properly practice his religion? More importantly, the boy takes the Catholic idea of devotion to the Virgin Mary and finds a realworld substitute for the Mother of God. We learn that he is especially fascinated by the older sister of one of his schoolmates. In the narrator's first description of Mangan's sister she is lit from behind, like a saint. "[H]er figure defined by the light from the half-opened door... . Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door," the narrator tells us, presenting an image of himself as a prostrate worshipper. Furthermore, he relates that' 'her image accompanied [him] even in places the most hostile to romance." Although the boy explains his feelings for Mangan's sister as romantic, his confusion between her and the Virgin Mary

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Compare &

Contrast 1906: The Abbey Theatre forms in Dublin as part of a push by notable literary figures such as W. B. Yeats to influence a cultural renaissance in Ireland. Today: Irish theater and Irish playwrights, including Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) achieve critical acclaim and popular success all over the world. 1906: Irish nationalist group, Sinn Fein (Gaelic for "We Ourselves") forms with the goal to achieve Irish independence from England, which rules all of Ireland. Today: Although the majority of Ireland became

are easily discernible:' 'Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises of which I myself did not understand." The boy is as rapturous as if he had seen a vision of the Mother of God herself. And when the girl finally speaks to him, he cannot respond coherently: "When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer." Joyce also makes the nonreligious, and even sexual, elements of the boy's devotion to Mangan's sister clear throughout the story. Her dress, her hair, and her "brown figure" are "always in [the narrator's] eye," and when he finally speaks to her, the same light that once made her glow like a saint now catches ' 'the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease." The boy melds religious devotion for the Virgin with his own romantic longing, and the combined force is powerful. When Mangan's sister asks him if he will be attending Araby, a church bazaar to be held soon, he is caught by surprise: "I forgot whether I answered yes or no." She tells him she must attend a retreat and cannot attend the fair. As his eyes fix upon the silver bracelet she twists on her wrist, he resolves to go and bring her back something that could compare with that bracelet. Here, the narrator ventures dangerously close to idolatry and the pre-Christian

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a sovereign nation in 1948, Northern Ireland, which consists of six counties, is still under English rule. English troops occupy Northern Ireland, and the IRA (Irish Republican Army) continues its terrorist attacks. 1899: W. B. Yeats publishes The Wind Among the Reeds, a poetry collection that incorporates ancient Irish-Gaelic myths and cultural traditions into its subject matter. Today: Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who mines Ireland's cultural and physical landscapes for his subject matter, wins the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature.

tradition of offerings to the gods. In a punning reference to this, he relates that because of his recent distraction in class, his schoolmaster ' 'hoped I was not beginning to idle." The shift from the boy's initially religious longings to more worldly concerns is accentuated by images of Araby that reverberate in his mind, taking on a very unreligious cast: ' "The syllables of the word 'Araby' were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me." This is a very ominous sentence; the boy's religious leanings are being completely overthrown by the lure of the mysterious, and possibly sensual, bazaar. The sensuality that he wished to obliterate earlier ("All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves," he tells us when he is in the priest's room, thinking of Mangan's sister) is now the very thing that he wants to indulge. The fact that Araby suggests a nonChristian culture is also significant here, for in his dedication to Mangan's sister the boy is willing to forsake the safe and familiar world of Catholic Ireland for what he believes to be the exotic and decadent East. As he stands in the upper-story room of his house, he looks upon his old playmates from above as they play in the street, and then looks up on the house across to where Mangan and his sister

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What Do I Read Next? Dubliners is the complete collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, all loosely connected as each one describes people living in Dublin, Ireland, at the turn of the century. A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan. This first novel by Joyce describes the early life of Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive, intelligent young man struggling to understand life and his role in it. Ireland: A Terrible Beauty (1975). A collection of photographs by Jill Uris, accompanied by text written by her husband, author Leon Uris. This book not only gives an overview of the history of the Emerald Isle, but also shows off the beauty of the island in many exquisite photographs. Ireland: Art into History (1994). This book, edited by Brian P. Kennedy and Raymond Gillespie, traces the history of Ireland through its art, from prehistoric times to the present. It

live. He feels himself chosen, like Sir Galahad (a noble knight from the legend of King Arthur) and prepares himself for his quest. After withstanding the peril of the drunken uncle and the aunt who hints he might have to ' 'put off [his] bazaar for this night of Our Lord," the protagonist is finally ready to embark upon his quest. His excitement is palpable as he rushes towards the festival, trying to get there before it closes. As he approaches the darkening hall, his once-clear purpose is now muddy: he "rememberfs] with difficulty why [he] had come." The futility and purposelessness of his project begins to dawn upon him as he hears an English shop-girl and two young English gentlemen chatting: "O, I never said such a thing!"

presents both art and history, without being too academic. The Common Chord: Stories and Tales (1947), by Frank O'Connor, is a collection of short stories from this famous Irish writer. Written from the point of view of a young boy, O'Connor's stories are funny, truthful, and many times touched with an edge of sadness. The Commitments (1988) and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), both by Irishman Roddy Doyle, are novels set in contemporary working-class Ireland. The Commitments describes the efforts of Jimmy Rabbitte to start a band which covers American soul songs of the 1960s by such greats as Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha gives the reader a look at life through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy in modern-day Ireland.

"O, there's a. ..fib!"

One of the recurring themes in Joyce's stories is the "epiphany," a Greek word meaning "revelation." In one of the drafts of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus is preoccupied by epiphanies: "By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture of in a memorable phrase or the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments." Joyce, like his fictional counterpart Stephen, saw the epiphany as a crucial building-block of fiction, because it was the moment at which a character understands that the illusions under which he or she has been operating are false and misleading.

"O, but you did!" "O, but I didn't!" "Didn't she say that?" "Yes. I heard her."

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At this point in "Araby," the narrator experiences an epiphany. As the protagonist nears the end of his quest and is about to buy a gift for Mangan's sister, he changes his mind. As he leaves the hall

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where the bazaar is closing down, the narrator says: "[glazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Somehow, the overheard conversation between the English shopgirl and her friends has changed his outlook. Here at the end of the story, the various symbols Joyce employs converge. The light in which the narrator has always seen Mangan's sister now meets the darkness of the hall as the bazaar shuts down. Our narrator begins to see Mangan' s sister not as the image of the Virgin, but as a mundane English shopgirl engaging in idle conversation. His quest, he now realizes, was misconceived in the first place, and he now recognizes the mistake of joining his religious fervor with his romantic passion for Mangan's sister. Although he does not say, it seems clear that the protagonist will fully reject both. The story, like much of his work, is taken almost directly from Joyce's own life. Like the narrator of this story, Joyce lived on North Richmond Street in Dublin and attended the Christian Brothers' School. The aunt and the uncle of "Araby" bear some resemblance to Joyce's own parents. Even Araby is factual: advertisements survive that date the bazaar to May, 1894. In Joyce's later fiction, characters almost identical to the narrator in "Araby" recur; the most prominent is Stephen Dedalus, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and one of the main characters in Ulysses. Both wrestle with a similar predicament—they must free themselves from the "nets" of their society, family, and religion in order to be entirely self-determined. Although many of the characters in Dubliners prefigure Joyce's later characters, the boy in "Araby" seems closest to being a younger version of Stephen Dedalus/James Joyce. He goes through almost the same struggle as Joyce shows Stephen fighting in Portrait. In the words of the critic Harry Stone, in The Antioch Review, "'Araby' is a portrait of the artist as a young boy." Source: Greg Barnhisel, for Short Stones for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

John Freimarck In the following essay, Freimarck suggests that "Araby" has a "Grail Quest" story pattern, and uses this classification to examine the boy's quest for the idealized girl, Mangan's sister. (In medieval English legend The Grail was a cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper that was later used to collect

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he protagonist, as with most of Joyce's main characters, is a sensitive boy, searching for principles with which to make sense of the chaos and banality of the world."

drops of his blood at the Crucifixion. Many of King Arthur's noblest knights went on a "Quest" in search of The Grail and its magical powers.) The story of a young boy journeying to Araby in hope of winning the favor of an idealized girl immediately raises echoes of the Grail Quest storypattern. Indeed, several actions and images in "Araby" common to basic versions of the Quest suggest this theme stimulated Joyce's imagination in ordering his modern material, and of course the reader who recognizes them is tempted to look for clues. Yet even in the case of Joyce such a reader can rest assured that it is not as important to scrutinize what goes into a story as to assess what comes out. In "Araby" a boy ignores the reality of his bleak, winter surroundings and allows the word 'araby' to suggest the exciting summer world of Romance. But, if it is a land of spices he dreams of, classical writers note that the richest part of Araby was infested with snakes. The very title of the story is the first of several images promising the apocalyptic world of romance, but containing the demonic. In a world hostile to romance, Mangan's sister is the object of the boy's "confused adoration." By the time his lady speaks, his naive crush has lead to the heroic bearing of her image like a chalice through market streets, and worship in a chapel-like room where the boy presses his hands together and murmurs "O love! O love!" Hearing she longs to go to Araby, but cannot, he promises to return with a gift if he should make the trip. Imprisoned on the other side of the railing before the house, turning the silver bracelet' 'round and round her wrist," the girl is the supplicant woman. The quest and marriage theme is strengthened when ' 'she held one of the

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great jars [grails] that stood like eastern guards [the cherub at the East wall of Eden?] at either side of the The very title of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured: 'No, thank you'." The wrong answer has been given and the story is the first of several boy asks no questions. The lights go out. When the knight does not ask the correct question in the castle images promising the it disappears and he wakes up at the edge of a cliff apocalyptic world of romance, by the ocean, or in a manure wagon being driven but containing the demonic." through a town where people insult him because of his failure to heal the land. Here the boy realizes his journey is over and feels humiliated. His failure brings an increase in knowledge, which, continuing the story's ironic counterpoint to Romance, does not bring hope or felicity. [railing] spikes, bowing her head towards me." In some versions of the Quest, the knight may marry or To press these parallels further is possible, but sleep with the maiden who carries the grail or to do so would be to pass the point of diminishing bleeding lance. In any case, no favor is lightly critical returns. The problem is one of perspective given; the journey preempts his thoughts and the which, in Dubliners, involves always keeping in everyday world is denied: "I had hardly any pamind the fact that the main impact of the story is on tience with the serious work of life." the naturalistic level, the faithfulness to the detail of Irish family life. It may be more to this level that The boy's confusion is something he causes Joyce's notion of paralysis really refers than to any himself. The girl's brown dress suggests she may other. The continual wonder is how Joyce can not be the true lady, and the boy's love is itself introduce so intricate and faithful a Quest storysuspect. The image he conjures up includes the pattern and yet subdue it to the naturalistic one we border of her slip; and lying on the floor, prostrating read at face value. The myth element enriches the himself before her, peeking under the drawn shade, story, but we are never really on the quest for the the boy is a voyeur. He is already doomed to failure grail—we are in Dublin all the time with the because he does not have the chaste mind and body psychologically accurate story of the growth of a essential to the quest. This is emphasized shortly romantic boy awakening to his sexuality, idealizing before he leaves for the bazaar. After going upstairs Mangan's sister and encountering frustration in (a position of relative height) he receives the tradithe process. tional vision, seeing "nothing but the brown figure cast by my imagination," a figure complete with the Source: John Freimarck, "'Araby': A Quest for Meaning," in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 7, no. 4, Summer, 1970, petticoat showing. Not only is the vision imagined, pp. 366-8. rather than beheld, but it is not even pure. Finally the boy begins his journey, leaving the house to the strains of "The Arab's Farewell to his Steed." The deserted train takes the place of a horse, passing through the waste land of "ruinous houses'' and crossing the body of water, a river, on its way to Araby. Araby, the building with the "magical name," is likened to a church; this, and the attendant at the door link it to the magic castle which the knight approaches in the evening. Inside, the young boy examines vases and flowered tea-sets, grail-like containers. Approaching the two men and the woman he is deterred by their attitude and the trivia of their conversation. In the grail castle the knight's success depends on his asking the right question concerning the grail which is carried past him. The woman questions the boy: ' 'I looked humbly at the

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Harry Stone Stone is an educator, editor, and Charles Dickens scholar. In the following excerpted essay, he discusses some of the autobiographical elements of ' 'Araby,'' which include Joyce's childhood in Dublin, Ireland, and how the exoticism of the real-life Araby festival, with its Far Eastern overtones, impacted the young Joyce. Stone also discusses the poet James Mangan 's influence on Joyce's framing of the narrator's adoration of (the character of) Mangan's sister. For ' 'Araby" preserves a central episode in Joyce's life, an episode he will endlessly recapitulate. The boy in "Araby," like the youthful Joyce himself, must begin to free himself from the nets and trammels of society. That beginning involves painful

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farewells and disturbing dislocations. The boy must dream "no more of enchanted days." He must forego the shimmering mirage of childhood, begin to see things as they really are. But to see things as they really are is only a prelude. Far in the distance lies his appointed (but as yet unimagined) task: to encounter the reality of experience and forge the uncreated conscience of his race. The whole of that struggle, of course, is set forth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. "Araby" is the identical struggle at an earlier stage; "Araby" is a portrait of the artist as a young boy. The autobiographical nexus of "Araby" is not confined to the struggle raging in the boy's mind, though that conflict—an epitome of Joyce's first painful effort to see—is central and controls all else. Many of the details of the story are also rooted in Joyce's life. The narrator of "Araby" —the narrator is the boy of the story now grown up— lived, like Joyce, on North Richmond Street. North Richmond Street is blind, with a detached twostory house at the blind end, and down the street, as the opening paragraph informs us, the Christian Brothers' school. Like Joyce, the boy attended this school, and again like Joyce he found it dull and stultifying. Furthermore, the boy's surrogate parents, his aunt and uncle, are a version of Joyce's parents: the aunt, with her forbearance and her unexamined piety, is like his mother; the uncle, with his irregular hours, his irresponsibility, his love of recitation, and his drunkenness, is like his father. The title and the central action of the story are also autobiographical. From May fourteenth to nineteenth, 1894, while the Joyce family was living on North Richmond Street and Joyce was twelve, Araby came to Dublin. Araby was a bazaar, and the program of the bazaar, advertising the fair as a "Grand Oriental Fete," featured the name "Araby" in huge exotic letters, while the design as well as the detail of the program conveyed an ill-assorted blend of pseudo-Eastern romanticism and blatant commercialism. For one shilling, as the program put it, one could visit "Araby in Dublin" and at the same time aid the Jervis Street Hospita Other literary prototypes also contribute to ' 'Araby." In ' 'Araby" as in Joyce's life, Mangan is an important name. In life Mangan was one of Joyce's favorite Romantic poets, a little-known Irish poet who pretended that many of his poems were translations from the Arabic although he was totally ignorant of that language. Joyce championed him in a paper delivered as a Pateresque [Walter

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Joyce has succeeded, here, in taking the raw, rather humdrum, unpromising facts of his own life and transforming them into abiding patterns of beauty and illumination."

Pater was a nineteenth-century English essayist and critic] twenty-year-old before the Literary and Historical Society of University College, Dublin, and championed him again five years later, in a lecture at the Universita Popolare in Trieste, as ' 'the most significant poet of the modern Celtic world, and one of the most inspired singers that ever used the lyric form in any country." In "Araby" Mangan is the boy's friend, but, what is more important, Mangan's sister is the adored girl. In each lecture Joyce discussed Mangan's poetry in words which could serve as an epigraph for the boy's mute, chivalric love for Mangan's sister and for his subsequent disillusionment and self-disdain. In the latter lecture, Joyce described the female persona that Mangan is constantly adoring: This figure which he adores recalls the spiritual yearnings and the imaginary loves of the Middle Ages, and Mangan has placed his lady in a world full of melody, of lights and perfumes, a world that grows fatally to frame every face that the eyes of a poet have gazed on with love. There is only one chivalrous idea, only one male devotion, that lights up the faces of Vittoria Colonna, Laura, and Beatrice, just as the bitter disillusion and the self-disdain that end the chapter are one and the same.

And one of Joyce's favorite poems by Mangan—a poem whose influence recurs in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and —is "Dark Rosaleen," a love paean to a girl who represents Ireland (Dark Rosaleen is a poetic name for Ireland), physical love, and romantic adoration. In "Araby" Joyce took Mangan's idealized girl as an embodiment of the artist's, especially the Irish artist's, relationship to his beloved, and then, combining the image of the girl with other resonating literary associations, wrote his own story of dawning, worshipful love

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These and other ambiguously worded ironies had already been sounded by the three opening sentences of "Araby." Joyce begins by telling us that North Richmond Street is blind. That North Richmond Street is a dead end is a simple statement of fact; but that the street is blind, especially since this feature is given significant emphasis in the opening phrases of the story, suggests that blindness plays a role thematically. It suggests, as we later come to understand, that the boy also is blind, that he has reached a dead end in his life. Finally, we are told that the houses of North Richmond Street ' 'conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.'' These words, too, are ironic. For the boy will shortly discover that his own consciousness of a decent life within has been a mirage; the imperturbable surface of North Richmond Street (and of the boy's life) will soon be perturbed. In these opening paragraphs Joyce touches all the themes he will later develop: self-deluding blindness, self-inflating romanticism, decayed religion, mammonism, the coming into man's inheritance, and the gulf between appearance and reality. But these paragraphs do more: they link what could have been the idiosyncratic story of the boy, his problems and distortions, to the problems and distortions of Catholicism and of Ireland as a whole. In other words, the opening paragraphs (and one or two other sections) prevent us from believing that the fault is solely in the boy and not, to some extent at least, in the world that surrounds him, and still more fundamentally, in the nature of man himself. The boy, of course, contributes intricately to his own deception. His growing fascination for Mangan's sister is made to convey his blindness and his warring consciousness. Joyce suggests these confusions by the most artful images, symbolisms, and parallelisms. The picture of Mangan's sister which first sinks unforgettably into the boy's receptive mind is of the girl calling and waiting at her doorstep in the dusk, "her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door," while he plays in the twilight and then stands ' 'by the railings looking at her.'' ' 'Her dress,'' he remembered,' 'swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side." This highly evocative, carefully staged, and carefully lit scene—it will recur throughout the story with slight but significant variations—gathers meaning as its many details take on definition and thematic importance. That importance was central

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to Joyce, and versions of the scene occur often in his writings. As his Mangan essay (1902) indicates, he had early chosen the adored female as an emblem of man's vanity, an emblem of false vision and selfdelusion followed by insight and self-disdain. The female who appears in ' 'Araby'' (she appears again and again in his other writings) is such an emblem. The prototypical situation in all these appearances is of a male gazing at a female in a dim, veiled light. There are other features: the male usually looks up at the female; he often finds her standing half obscured near the top of some stairs and by a railing; he frequently notices her hair, her skirts, and her underclothes. But though the scene varies from appearance to appearance, the consequences are always the same. The male superimposes his own idealized vision upon this shadowy figure, only to have disillusioning reality (which has been there unregarded all the time) assert itself and devastate him. Joyce found this scene—with its shifting aureola of religious adoration, sexual beckoning, and blurred vision—infinitely suggestive, and he utilized it for major effect.... Araby—the very word connotes the nature of the boy's confusion. It is a word redolent of the lush East, of distant lands, Levantine riches, romantic entertainments, mysterious magic, "Grand Oriental Fetes." The boy immerses himself in this incensefilled dream world. He tells us that' 'the syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me.'' That enchantment, or to put it another way, Near Eastern imagery (usually in conjunction with female opulence or romantic wish fulfillment), always excited Joyce. It reappears strongly in Ulysses in a highly intricate counterpoint, which is sometimes serious (Molly's Moorish attributes) and sometimes mocking (Bloom's dream of a Messianic Near Eastern oasis). But the boy in "Araby" always interprets these associations, no matter how disparate or how ambiguous they are, in one way: as correlatives of a baroquely beatific way of living. Yet the real, brickand-mortar Araby in the boy's life is a bazaar, a market, a place where money and goods are exchanged. The boy is blind to this reality lurking beneath his enchanted dream. To the boy, his lady's silver bracelet is only part of her Eastern finery; his journey to a bazaar to buy her an offering is part of a romantic quest. But from this point on in the story the masquerading pretenses of the boy—and of his church, his land, his rules, and his love—are rapidly underlined and brought into a conjunction which

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will pierce his perfervid dream world and put an end to "enchanted days...." Joyce has succeeded, here, in taking the raw, rather humdrum, unpromising facts of his own life and transforming them into abiding patterns of beauty and illumination. He has taken a universal experience—a more or less ordinary experience of insight, disillusionment, and growth—and given it an extraordinary application and import. The experience becomes a criticism of a nation, a religion, a civilization, a way of existing; it becomes a grappling hook with which we can scale our own wellguarded citadels of self-delusion. Joyce does all this in six or seven pages. He manages this feat by endowing the simple phrases and actions of' 'Araby" with multiple meanings that deepen and enlarge what he is saying. The image of Mangan's sister is acase in point. Joyce takes this shadowy image, this dark scene which fascinated and obsessed him and which he returned to again and again, and shapes it to his purposes. He projects this image so carefully, touches it so delicately and skillfully with directive associations and connotations, that it conveys simultaneously, in one simple seamless whole, all the warring meanings he wishes it to hold—all the warring meanings it held for him. The pose of the harlot is also the pose of the Virgin; the revered Lady of Romance (kin to Vittoria Colonna, Laura, Beatrice, Levana, Dark Rosaleen, and the beloved of any artist) is also Ireland and at the same time a vulgar English shopgirl. One need not belabor the point. These meanings are conveyed not merely by the juxtapositions and evocations of the chief images— of Mangan's dark sister and the English shopgirl, for example—but by the reiterated patterns, allusions, and actions which bind the whole work together: the dead priest's charitableness, Mrs. Mercer's used stamps, the fall of money on the salver;

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Araby, Eastern enchantment, the knightly quest for a chivalric token; the swaying dress, the veiled senses, the prayerful murmur, ' 'O love! O love! Scarcely a line, an evocation, on object—the central apple tree, the heretical book of devotions by Abednego Seller, "The Arab's Farewell to His Steed," the blind street—but adds its harmony to the whole and extends and clarifies the story's meaning. Source: Harry Stone, "'Araby' and the Writings of James Joyce," in TheAntioch Review, Vol. XXV, no. 3, Fall, 1965, pp. 375^45.

Sources Scholes, Robert and A. Walton Litz, editors. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, Penguin, 1996.

Further Reading apRoberts, R. P.' 'The Palimpsest of Criticism; or, Through a Glass Eye Darkly," in The Antioch Review, Vol. XXVI, 1966-67, pp. 469-89. apRoberts's sarcastic attack on what he sees as Harry Stone's excessively reaching reading of "Araby." Where Stone holds that "Araby" must be seen in light of Joyce's other writing, apRoberts insists that it is self-contained. Brown, Homer Obed. James Joyce's Early Fiction, Archon, 1975. A study of the methods of Joyce's early fiction (primarily Dubliners) and the themes the work explores. Levin, Harry. James Joyce, New Directions, 1960. A general discussion of Joyce's work and his techniques, written in 1941, the year of Joyce's death.

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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Mark Twain

1865

Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' was first published in the November 18,1865, edition of The New York Saturday Press, under the title ' 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." The story, which has also been published as ' 'The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," is set in a gold-mining camp in Calaveras County, California, and has its origins in the folklore of the Gold Rush era. It was one of Twain's earliest writings, and helped establish his reputation as a humorist. He eventually included it as the title story in his first collection of tales. "Jumping Frog" was originally told in epistolary form—that is, as a letter—though some reprints of the tale have since omitted this letterframe convention. In the story, Twain recounts his visit, made at the request of a friend back East, to an old man named Simon Wheeler in a California mining camp. Wheeler tells Twain a colorful story about another miner, Jim Smiley. According to Wheeler, Smiley loved to make bets; he would bet on nearly anything. Wheeler relates some of Smiley's more famous gambling escapades, one of which concerns a pet frog. Critics frequently cite this story as an example of a tall tale and note Twain's use of humor and exaggeration. They also emphasize the tale's satirical focus on storytelling and existing cultural differences between the western and eastern regions of the United States.

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Author Biography Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He spent much of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a town located on the Mississippi River. He never finished school and instead became an apprentice to a printer at the age of 12. In the 1850s, he worked as a boat pilot and later briefly served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. During this time he submitted his first journalism pieces, using the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. He then traveled west and found work as a miner and a reporter. It was at this time that he first began to publish work under the name Mark Twain and establish himself as a sketchwriter and humorist. "Mark Twain" was a reference to his riverboat days; it was a term that the men who worked on the boats used to indicate the depth of the water. Twain's first sketch to win widespread acclaim was the 1865 short story,' "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which first appeared in the The New York Saturday Press. It later appeared as the title story in his first collection, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches in 1867. At the time this book was published, Twain began traveling abroad and often sent his satirical and humorous observations home for publication in American journals. Many of these pieces were later collected and published in 1869 as The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress. Around this time, Twain also wrote pieces for the Sacramento Union newspaper, often employing the letter-writing and reporting techniques he used in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Incorporating memories of his boyhood and life on the Mississippi, Twain published his children's book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. Twain published the sequel to this American classic of American boyhood, the critically acclaimed and equally popular The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in 1884. Like much of his work, Huck Finn made use of vernacular language and dialect, and emphasized the inherent injustice of American society. In the late 1800s, Twain suffered various financial and personal losses, and his satirical wit and often pessimistic outlook became overwhelmingly apparent in such classics as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." When Twain died in Redding, Connecticut, in 1910, he

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Plot Summary ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" has an "as-told-to" framework. A talkative man named Simon Wheeler relates to Mark Twain (the narrator) the story of a gambler named Jim Smiley and the amazing animals Smiley used in his schemes. Twain has gone to see Wheeler at the urging of a friend back East who is in search of information about a boyhood companion named Leonidas W. Smiley. Leonidas W. Smiley had supposedly become a minister and gone to a western mining settlement called Angel's Camp. The narrator notes he has come to believe there is no such person as Leonidas W. Smiley, and that the inquiry was designed to provide Wheeler with an excuse to talk about Jim Smiley. The narrator finds Wheeler in a run-down tavern in Angel's Camp and politely asks about Leonidas W. Smiley. The name means nothing to Wheeler, but he thinks almost immediately of Jim Smiley and begins filling his visitor with tales of this bizarre character. Jim Smiley, according to Wheeler, was a man who would bet on anything.' 'Why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first," Wheeler says. Wheeler recalls that Smiley had a slow, sickly horse that would surprise everyone by winning races, and Smiley frequently won money with that horse. Smiley's bulldog pup, named Andrew Jackson after the strong-willed U.S. president, also had an amazing talent. Andrew Jackson the dog was not very impressive in appearance, but remarkably tenacious when there was a bet riding on him. He would let another dog beat him savagely until the largest and final bet of the fight was on, then take one of his opponent's hind legs in his mouth and hold on until the other dog simply gave up. He continued winning in this manner until he went up against a dog with no hind legs. Unable to use his favorite tactic, Andrew Jackson became so disheartened that he just slunk off and died, Wheeler tells Twain. Wheeler continues with a story about how Smiley once caught a frog and trained it to jump. The frog, named after famed nineteenth-century American politician Daniel Webster, developed incredible jumping ability. Smiley won many bets

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inclination" to hear this story, the narrator makes his escape.

Characters Andrew Jackson

Mark Twain

with Dan'l Webster and took great pride in him, Wheeler says. One day Smiley boasted to a stranger in the camp that Dan'l Webster could outjump any frog in Calaveras County, and he offered to bet forty dollars to prove it. The stranger had no frog to pit against Smiley's, so Smiley left Dan'l Webster with him and went to find another frog in a nearby swamp. While Smiley was gone, the stranger spooned buckshot into Dan'l Webster's mouth until the frog was weighted down. Smiley returned with the second frog and the jumping contest began, but Dan'l Webster could not move. After the stranger took his money and his leave, Smiley noticed that something appeared to be wrong with Dan'l. He lifted the frog, realized how heavy it was, and turned it upside down until it belched out the shot. He then chased after the visitor, but never caught him, Wheeler relates. At this point in the tale, someone outside the tavern calls Wheeler's name, and Wheeler steps out after urging the narrator to wait for him to return. By this time, however, the narrator believes he will obtain no useful information from Wheeler, and he gets up to leave. As he reaches the door, Wheeler comes back and starts to tell him about Jim Smiley's one-eyed, no-tailed cow. "Lacking both time and

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Jim Smiley's bull-pup, Andrew Jackson, was used by Jim in various bets. The dog is described as a good dog that does not look like much, and other dogs often seemed to get the better of him in fights. The narrator notes, however, that Andrew Jackson never seemed to be bothered by these temporary setbacks because once a bet was involved, his behavior would change. As the stakes in the bets were raised, Andrew Jackson would bite the other dog in the hind leg and stay there, hanging on, until the owner of his opponent would give in and forfeit the fight. In this way, Jim's bull-pup would win his fights. Andrew Jackson died when Jim arranged for him to fight a dog that did not have any hind legs. The narrator implies that Andrew Jackson was a proud dog and died of embarrassment. Like the former President of the United States with whom he shares his name, Andrew Jackson is described as being determined and strong-willed.

The Fifteen-Minute Nag The Fifteen-Minute Nag is the name given to Jim Smiley's horse. An old and rather sickly animal, The Fifteen-Minute Nag was used by Jim in many of his bets. The horse suffered from various ailments and did not look as if she could win a horse race. Nevertheless, Jim would frequently put her in races. Although she would start out slow, in the last leg of the race, the nag always seemed to get excited and typically found the energy to win the race.

Jim Smiley Jim Smiley is the focus of Simon Wheeler's tale. A resident of Calaveras County's Angel's Camp in either 1849 or 1850, Jim is primarily known for his love for betting and will bet on almost anything—no matter how ridiculous. He has even bet on whether people will recover from an illness and on which of two birds will fly away first. It is said Jim would even make a poor bet just so that he could make a bet. Jim was considered a lucky man, however, and frequently won his bets. Jim has several pets: an old horse, a bull-pup named An-

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drew Jackson, cats, chickens, and a frog named Dan'l Webster, who is the "celebrated frog" mentioned in the title of this story. Jim uses these animals' abilities as the basis for many of his bets. He is tricked by the Stranger at the tale's end, which contrasts with the visitor Twain being tricked by the local, Simon Wheeler.

The Stranger The Stranger is a con artist. He states that Dan'l Webster isn't the prized jumper that Jim says he is and bets that any other frog could beat Dan'l in a jumping contest. While Jim searches for another frog, the stranger feeds Dan'l Webster quail shot to make him too heavy to jump and thereby swindles Jim out of his money. This situation—the Stranger duping the local (Jim Smiley)—contrasts with Simon Wheeler, the local, who dupes Twain, the visitor.

Mark Twain Mark Twain is the author and narrator of the story, as well as one of its characters. He is portrayed as the butt of a joke, the joke being having to listen to the fantastic tales of a garrulous old man named Simon Wheeler. Twain allegedly was asked by a friend to find out about an acquaintance of that friend. Twain thinks that this was merely a trick, however, and is subsequently frustrated by his entire experience with Wheeler. Coming across as an impatient, condescending man unwilling to listen to Wheeler, he sneaks away when he gets the chance. Twain speaks in perfect English and may be viewed as a symbol of the snobbery associated with the eastern United States during the nineteenth century.

Daniel Webster See Dan'l Webster

Dan'l Webster Dan'l Webster is the "notorious jumping frog of Calaveras County." He is caught by Jim Smiley and trained by him to jump high, far, and on command. When jumping, he does somersaults and is described by the narrator as "whirling in the air like a doughnut." Despite his jumping prowess, he is described as being modest and straightforward. He is often used in Jim's bets and is the victim of the Stranger's prank. According to Jim, Dan'l Webster can out-jump any frog in Calaveras County. He shares his name with the famous nineteenth-century American statesman and orator.

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Media Adaptations Director John Sturges's The Best Man Wins was distributed by Columbia in 1948. This film version of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' starred Edgar Buchanan and Anna Lee. Learning Garden Films released an animated version of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in 1987.

Simon Wheeler Simon Wheeler is an elderly resident of the Western mining operation known as Angel's Camp. A fat, balding man whom Twain finds in a bar, Simon is described condescendingly as possessing ' 'an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity." He remembers when much of the camp was being built and provides the actual story of the infamous betting man named Jim Smiley and his "notorious jumping frog." Though he seems comfortable with his role as storyteller, Simon seems oblivious to the fact that he is boring his listener, Mark Twain, and is seemingly unaware of the fantastic nature of his tale. For his part, Twain asserts that although Simon speaks for a very long time and with a lack of enthusiasm and emotion, he speaks sincerely and takes his stories seriously. Critics note, however, that Simon is well aware of his narrative abilities and is not as naive as he seems. Despite his supposed lack of sophistication, he immediately sizes up the cultured Easterner Twain and dupes him into hearing this fantastic tale.

Themes A cultured Easterner relates his recent visit to a talkative old man at a western mining camp. Rather than providing information that the Easterner is looking for, the old man keeps him waiting while he spins a tale about a betting man and his pet frog.

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Topics for Further Study Twain's story was first written as a letter, a style referred to as epistolary. Other examples of epistolary works are Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). Discuss how the epistolary form impacts the narrative and the reader's interest in a work. Research what life—particularly life in a mining camp—was like in California at the time Twain wrote this tale. Tall tales and folk tales traditionally have been used to present nontraditional ideas about society. Examine the social and political messages found in Joel Chandler Harris's "Br'er Rabbit" stories, and compare them to this story. Compare Twain's use of satire with that of Jonathan Swift in his "A Modest Proposal" (1729). What and who do these stories satirize? Compare this tale to Twain's other travel sketches or humorous writings. Discuss their similarities and differences.

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He speaks in monotone, supposedly having no knowledge of the techniques a good storyteller uses to keep an audience's attention. An uneducated man, Wheeler tells his story in the popular genre of the tall tale, rather than in one of the more accepted classic genres taught in eastern schools. He also speaks in the vernacular; that is, in common language, which contains idiomatic expressions, slang, and improper grammar and syntax. Wheeler's use of vernacular language reinforces the idea that the West was populated by crude barbarians who had little education or knowledge of good speech. In stark contrast to Simon Wheeler, the narrator, Mark Twain, comes across as well-educated with refined tastes. This Mark Twain is a storyteller also, but in the passages that precede and follow Wheeler's tale, Twain speaks in proper English. It is obvious he has been educated in the finer points of grammar and syntax. Twain, however, also comes across as a snob. He is annoyed by Wheeler's diction and, because he finds Wheeler's quaint stories fantastic, he thinks they lack value. Indeed, when Wheeler is called away, Twain sneaks off, unwilling to listen any longer. Twain does not consider Wheeler to be an effective storyteller because the old man does not use the conventions that Twain prefers. He does not realize, however, that Wheeler is actually capitalizing on the stereotype of the uneducated Westerner. For instance, although Twain finds Wheeler's voice monotonous, it makes him believe Wheeler speaks with straightforward earnestness. Wheeler craftily balances the absurdity of his tale with the gravity with which he speaks to keep Twain in the listener's seat.

Culture Clash ' "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," highlights various aspects of late nineteenth-century American society and culture through the retelling of a tall tale. Central to the story is the idea of conflicting cultures, particularly the clash between the settled, eastern portion of the United States and the still-developing West. At the time Twain wrote the story, the East and its inhabitants had a reputation for being civilized, cultured, and advanced. The West, on the other hand, was still being settled and was considered to be populated by a less-educated and less-refined group of people. By extension, Westerners were thought by Easterners to be naive and easily duped. Twain presents these ideas in his story in various ways. Simon Wheeler, for instance, symbolizes the American Westerner—a garrulous old man who tells tales that are farfetched and highly improbable.

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Deception Deception is an integral part of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' and occurs on many levels. In the opening paragraph Mark Twain, the narrator, voices his suspicion that he has been duped by a friend who orchestrated this ' 'chance'' encounter with Simon Wheeler. His friend asked him to inquire about a childhood friend named Leonidas Smiley, knowing full well that Twain would instead be subjected to fabulous stories about the famous betting man of Angel's Camp— Jim Smiley. His friend additionally knew that Twain would be bored and frustrated by the entire experience. Wheeler likewise dupes Twain. He tells him the fantastic and improbable story of Jim—rather than Leonidas—Smiley with a grave demeanor that masks the genuine humor of his tale. By using this mask, Wheeler initially fools the snobby Easterner

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and convinces him that he will be told a serious story. Another instance of deception involves Jim Smiley's bet with the Stranger, who wagers that Dan'l Webster is not the best jumper in Calaveras County. Not only does the Stranger deceive Jim Smiley by pretending to be gullible, he cheats by stuffing Dan'l Webster with gunshot to weigh him down.

American Society When first published, ' "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" provided relevant and incisive commentary about ninteenth-century American society. While portraying Easterners as educated and refined and Westerners as uneducated and gullible on the surface, Twain upset these stereotypes on a deeper level. He depicted the Easterner (Mark Twain) as a snob and someone who could easily be duped, while portraying the Westerner (Simon Wheeler) as somewhat of a schemer who, despite his lack of formal training, tells highly original tales. The names of Jim Smiley's pets also had relevance for Twain's American audience. Daniel Webster was the name of a famous American statesman known for his speaking abilities. Andrew Jackson, a former president of the United States and war hero known for his determination and strong will, was a strong believer in democracy and the rights of the "common" people. In these and other descriptions found in the story, Twain provided a more complicated and multifaceted view of Americans. "Jumping Frog" asserted that Americans could simultaneously be resourceful, innovative, practical, and determined, as well as shortsighted, narrow-minded, and gullible.

Style Structure The frame tale structure of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is one of its most important parts. In a frame tale, one story appears in—that is, it is framed by—another story. In "Jumping Frog" the outer tale focuses on Mark Twain and his meeting with the talkative old storyteller, Simon Wheeler. This meeting occurs at the request of a friend of Twain's, identified in some versions of the tale as A. Ward, who supposedly wants to find out about an old acquaintance named Leonidas Smiley. Twain reveals, however, that he suspects his friend's request was merely a practical joke designed to waste his time. Twain's suspicions

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about the meeting and his descriptions of Wheeler appear in the few paragraphs that open and close the entire story. Twain speaks in the first person in these passages. Because this portion of the tale first appeared in the form of a letter, the entire story also can be considered an epistolary tale. The inner tale is the one Wheeler tells about Jim Smiley, his betting ways, and his run-in with the Stranger. Wheeler's stories seem largely exaggerated, and can be viewed as examples of a tall tale. Wheeler tells his tale in a third-person narrative voice.

Setting ' The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" takes place in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, shortly after the California Gold Rush of 1849. Mark Twain's experience with Simon Wheeler and Wheeler's stories about Jim Smiley both occur in Angel's Camp, a mining camp located in Calaveras County, California. Wheeler tells Twain his stories in a local bar, the type of place where stories are often shared.

Satire Satire is an essential component o f ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Satire is a technique that involves the manipulation of stereotypes and the use of exaggeration to point out the folly of a person or situation. In "Jumping Frog'' Twain pokes fun at several things, including the tall tale genre, the American West, and the American East. Instead of merely using the tall tale for humorous effect, Twain also uses it to challenge various stereotypes held by many Americans at the time. According to these stereotypes, individuals living in the western United States were often uneducated, gullible fools. By contrast, Americans living in the eastern part of the United States were supposed to be well-educated, sophisticated, and cultured. In a satirical twist, Twain's sophisticated Easterner actually comes across as an impatient and self-absorbed snob who gets fooled by both his friend and the garrulous Wheeler. Likewise, Wheeler is ultimately revealed to be not a rube, but a goodnatured and experienced storyteller whose deadpan delivery is merely a front used to fool his supposedly sophisticated listener.

Tall Tale A tall tale features exaggerated, fabulous events. Characters in tall tales are often considered ' 'larger than life," meaning they exhibit extraordinary quali-

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ties. Simon Wheeler's stories about Jim Smiley and his pets feature many such exaggerations, and thus fall into the tall tale category. For example, Wheeler describes Smiley as a man who will make a bet on anything, even something as mundane as which of two birds will fly off a fence first. Smiley's frog, Dan'l Webster, practically flies through the air when jumping and uses his legs like a cat to scratch himself. Finally, Andrew Jackson, Smiley's dog, will hold on to another dog—his preferred technique for fighting—for as long as a year to win a fight.

Anthropomorphism Twain gives the animals in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' human traits, a technique called anthropomorphism. Andrew Jackson, Jim Smiley's dog, is described as proud, ornery, and determined. He likes to fight and likes to win his battles. When he fights a dog that he can't beat, he eventually dies from the humiliation. Both Andrew Jackson and the frog named Dan'l Webster are described as gifted. Dan'l Webster is additionally described as being modest and straightforward.

Diction Authors frequently use dialect and vernacular language to establish the setting of their tales, as well as their characters' identities. In "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Twain uses language to highlight the differences between his characters. For example, when Twain speaks, he uses grammatically proper English. Simon Wheeler, however, tells his tale in the vernacular, or common-day language, of the American West. Wheeler ignores many grammatical rules, and speaks with an "accent" of sorts. He says "feller" instead of "fellow," "reg'lar" instead of "regular," and even "Dan'l" for "Daniel."

Historical Context America in the Mid to Late Nineteenth Century ' The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first published in 1865, when Mark

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Twain was living in the American Southwest, which was still in the process of being settled. The Industrial Revolution had brought machinery and factories to the eastern United States, but most of the country, particularly areas west of the Mississippi River, still relied on the land for economic development. Much of the land in the West was devoted to cattle, and the U.S. government was involved in battles and embroilments with various Native American tribes in order to obtain more land. The West's growing population was influenced by both the Homestead Act of 1862, which promised free farms to families, and by the discovery of gold in California in 1848. As a result of this discovery, mining towns and camps, such as Angel's Camp where Twain sets "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," were established throughout California and the western United States. Despite the increasing growth out West, there was still a great divide between the eastern and western parts of the United States. The West was thought to be wild and woolly, and populated by rough, uneducated pioneers. Easterners, on the other hand, were assumed to be more educated, polite, cultured, and sophisticated—in a word, "genteel." Although trains and steam boats were popular modes of transportation, the transcontinental railroad had not yet been completed. This made travel between the two regions difficult, and this fact added to the sense of separation between them.

Literature in the United States At the time Twain wrote "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," distinctly American literature was still in its infancy. Henry James was beginning an acclaimed literary career and influencing the development of the modern novel form. Representing the cultured East, James often wrote of transplanted Americans in Europe and the tradition-bound Europeans who looked down on them for lacking sophistication. In direct contrast to James, Twain was busy forging an American identity in literature—based on the rugged and independent individuals who lived outside the East. Twain's writing style forsook eloquence to focus on addressing situations unique to the United States and Americans. Classics such as Huckleberry Finn featured familiar American characters and settings, while commenting on the growing nation's social issues.

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E. W. Kemble's original illustration for Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.''

Critical Overview ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was a popular success upon its first publication in The New York Saturday Press in 1865. Some of its success can be attributed to Twain's use of popular storytelling conventions and references to contemporary figures. For example, Twain adopted the humorous tall tale of the American Southwest, a popular genre at the time, to tell this story. Furthermore, this tale already was an established piece of American folklore that Twain modified and enhanced; early versions of the tale focused on a jumping grasshopper, not a frog. Twain added to the popularity of his "Jumping Frog" by reciting it at lectures and performances he gave across the United States. Because of its popularity, when Twain published his first collection of stories, he made "Jumping Frog" the title piece. The letter-writing structure initially used in this tale was popular at that time and also contributed to the story's success. In the tale, Twain also made allusions to recent figures in contemporary American history. For example, Jim Smiley's dog, Andrew Jackson, shares

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his name with a former president of the United States, while Smiley's frog, Dan'l Webster, shares his name with a renowned statesman and politician of the nineteenth century. The letter that frames the original story was addressed to "A. Ward," whom many individuals believed to be Artemus Ward, another popular humor writer of the time. These references and conventions made the tale more accessible and thus popular with Twain's contemporaries. Although "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was initially admired for its humor and as an example of a tall tale, it also became known for its satirical portrait of the American East. Although one of Twain's earliest and most successful pieces—a piece that established him as a sketchwriter and humorist—this story also has much in common with his later works, which critics frequently note for their biting comments about American society and human nature. Furthermore, it is noted that by portraying himself as a fool, Twain could get away with more outrageous and possibly offensive comments. For example, he could feature a Westerner (Wheeler) duping an Easterner (Twain)—a situation that reversed the popular

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Compare & Contrast 1865: People from around the United States and Mexico continue to flock to California in search of prosperity after the Gold Rush of 1849. Today: The state of California, led by Governor Pete Wilson, passes strict legislation designed to discourage illegal immigration. 1864: Congress passes a bill to protect California's Yosemite Valley, designating it the first public scenic reserve in the United States. Today: Environmentalists and big business fight

stereotypes of the day—without offending Eastern audiences. It must be noted, however, that Twain allowed Jim Smiley, a Westerner, to be duped when he lets his guard down. More recent interpretations of the story, by critics such as Lawrence R. Smith, have focused on the symbolism attached to the names used in the story. In Mark Twain Journal, Smith asserts that Twain's use of names offers insights into American society. "Smiley," for instance, is considered an optimistic name. The dog Andrew Jackson shares his name with the seventh president of the United States, a brave man of' 'common stock'' known for his strong will. Jackson was also known as a proponent of the idea of democracy—a philosophy Twain highly valued—which is shared by all U.S. citizens regardless of their geographic location. In the case of the two men named Smiley, "Leonidas," the name associated with Twain's Eastern friend, is a more sophisticated and potentially snobbish name. These qualities, sophistication and snobbery, were sometimes associated with the society of the eastern United States. "Jim," on the other hand, is a more popular and common name, just as frontiersmen were generally considered more "common" and less sophisticated. Critics believe, therefore, that ' The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" provides a symbolic commentary on the melting pot of American society and the positive and negative qualities of all Americans.

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over whether to protect dwindling forests in the Pacific Northwest. 1861: A Western Union telegraph line opens between New York and San Francisco, making communication between the eastern and western United States easier. Today: Internet services provide a cheap and virtually limitless form of long distance communication, bridging disparate peoples and cultures in the process.

Criticism Trudy Ring Trudy Ring is a frequent writer, editor, and reporter on literary subjects. In the following essay, she discusses Twain's use of the frame narrative, satiric elements, and the significance of the character names in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.'' ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' ' appears at first glance to be a simple, humorous story, but actually is a complex satire of American literature, social conventions, and politics. Like the land around the mining settlement of Angel's Camp, it has riches under the surface, and the patient and careful reader can tap into this vein. Inspired by an anecdote Mark Twain heard while traveling in the western United States, the sketch was published in various forms and under various titles, including ' 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" and "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," but the basic story remains the same in all versions. The narrator, apparently from the eastern part of the nation, finds himself in a western mining camp listening to a rustic character tell stories about a habitual gambler named Jim Smiley and the animals that were the subject of Smiley's bets.

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What Do I Read Next? Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) uses the tall tale and frame narrative forms to examine life in the American South of the nineteenth century. BretHarte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1869) and "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868) offer portraits of life in mining camps and on the American frontier. In the title story of the 1993 collection One Good Story, That One, Native American writer Thomas King satirizes the importance of storytelling in anthropological studies and the conflicts that

The story's structure was familiar to American readers in the nineteenth century. Many writers of the era penned "frame stories," commonly set in the southwestern United States, showing supposedly sophisticated and cultured Easterners encountering less polished characters on the frontiers of the expanding nation. The rough Westerners would tell tales that were often preposterous, and the Easterners' account of, and reaction to, these stories provided a ' 'frame'' for them. ' 'Writers often capitalized on the juxtaposition of literate traveler and colloquial rustic, exaggerating their differences of manners and speech to suggest cultural absurdities in one or the other or both," critic Paul Baender explained in Modern Philology. ' 'Some writers also contrived little contests between the traveler and the rustic in which the rustic deceived the traveler with a tall tale." In "Jumping Frog," as several scholars have pointed out, Twain has used the conventions of these stories but also has gone beyond them, creating something fresh and unusual. Baender contended that "Jumping Frog" resembles southwestern frame stories but does not actually fit into this category.' 'Simon Wheeler sees no class or regional pretensions in the narrator and has none of his own . . . the tale follows . . . not as a regional outgrowth,

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occur between white society and Native Americans. In this tale, the narrator hoodwinks his white audience by telling how, supposedly according to his tribe's beliefs, the world was created. Mark Twain's success as a satirist and sketchwriter was further established by his 1869 book The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress, in which he wrote of his experiences and observations while travelling through the Middle East and Europe with a group of well-to-do Americans.

but as a fabulous history even for the region," Baender asserted. The contrast between the narrator and Wheeler serves primarily to "direct us to the humor that follows," he argued. Paul Schmidt put forth a somewhat different view of Twain's use of the frame-story device. Schmidt noted in Southwest Review that in earlier southwestern frame stories and their predecessors— ' 'local color'' stories focusing on quirky, unsophisticated characters in various parts of the United States—the story's narrator tended to be identified with the author and to be condescending toward the rustics he or she encountered. As the southwestern frame story genre developed, authors found this condescending attitude conflicting with sincere admiration for the people of the frontier. Twain resolved this conflict, according to Schmidt, by separating his own point of view from that of the narrator and by making fun of the narrator's pomposity and pretension. Twain's accomplishment, Schmidt commented, is ' 'much more than the simple addition of another character to his satiric targets"; the author has managed to satirize "the entire point of view of the local colorist'' and ' 'the genteel version of the Enlightened traveler and belle esprit, a representative nineteenth-century American rich in official and accepted attitudes."

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There is much in the story to support this view. The narrator has an exaggerated and rather ridiculous formality in his manner of speaking. He reports that he went to see Simon Wheeler "in compliance with the request of a friend of mine''; he ' 'hereunto appendfs] the result." He assures Wheeler that he "would feel under many obligations to him" for any information Wheeler could provide about Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. The narrator obviously is annoyed by Wheeler's "interminable narrative," but maintains an attitude of pained tolerance, all the time letting us know he considers himself superior to Wheeler. Wheeler, the narrator says, "had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity" and told his tale with ' 'impressive earnestness and sincerity . . . far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter." Wheeler, however, possesses knowledge the narrator does not, and his story, suggested critic Lawrence R. Smith in Mark Twain Journal, contains details ' 'directed precisely at the ignorance of the narrator." For instance, Smith pointed out, Wheeler's portrait of the frog, with references to its chin and the nape of its neck (both hard to find on a frog),' 'could only be acceptable to a man who had never seen one, or at least had not looked at one very carefully." The narrator, though, is so convinced of his own superiority that he fails to realize Wheeler is playing with him, and he also fails to see anything of value in Wheeler's story. Critics have found a variety of valuable points in Wheeler's narrative. To Schmidt, it is the importance of cooperation in a community over unrestrained competition among individuals; the relaxed and cheerful Wheeler represents community values, while Jim Smiley disturbs the community with his competitiveness and pays the price for it when his frog loses the jumping contest. To Smith, Smiley is a more positive character, to be praised for his optimism and energy, who grows as a person when his frog is defeated; he learns not to be so naive and gullible. Either way, Wheeler's tale can be interpreted as a commentary that ambitious, individualistic types would benefit from taking a hard look at themselves, maintaining the admirable aspects of their personalities, and being willing to change the rest. Both through the story of Jim Smiley and the framing story of Wheeler and the narrator, Twain satirizes certain American ideas of the nature of success and how to achieve it, while he also satirizes authors who have condescended to their "rustic" characters."

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Twain aims his barbed wit at some other targets, too. As Smith noted, Twain was known to be skeptical of organized religion, so it is significant that his narrator is looking for information about a minister; the clergy becomes associated with the narrator's smug attitudes. A minister figures in Simon Wheeler's tale, too; he mentions that Jim Smiley would attend Parson Walker's camp meetings for the purpose of making bets. Smiley's apparent lack of respect for religion is a way of deflating the pomposity of some religious people. The names of the bulldog pup and the frog have satirical significance, too, but here the jokes become more complicated. The dog's namesake, President Andrew Jackson, had a public image as the champion of the common people and symbolized the belief that anyone, no matter how humble his origins, could, by talent and hard work, rise to the top of society. Wheeler ascribes just such talent to the dog, saying the animal "would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him and he had genius . . . he hadn't no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances if he hadn't no talent." Smith thought the symbolism of the name appropriate and called the dog ' 'the embodiment of Jacksonian democracy.'' But another scholar, S. J. Krause, has argued in American Quarterly that Jackson actually considered himself superior to the so-called common people, that his stubbornness was not altogether admirable, and that he had a penchant for gambling. The story of the dog, therefore, is a means of subtly ridiculing Jackson, according to Krause. The frog is named after Daniel Webster, who distinguished himself as a U.S. congressman, senator, and Secretary of State. Krause has noted, though, that Webster was a political pragmatist, changing his stances when necessary—in other words, flip-flopping, just like the frog. Also important is the fact that just as the frog cannot jump in the final contest detailed in the story, Webster failed to make the ultimate leap in politics—he never became president. It takes some knowledge of history to appreciate Twain's humor here, but this knowledge allows the reader to understand and enjoy the story on yet another level. The names of other characters are meaningful, as well, and this is something upon which numerous critics have commented. "Simon Wheeler" suggests both "Simple Simon" of the nursery rhyme and a not-so-simple "wheeler-dealer." This is appropriate because Simon does appear, at least in the narrator's opinion, to be simple, both in the

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sense of being uncomplicated and in the sense of being not very bright; but, in reality, he is rather complex and crafty. In regard to the two Smileys, the simplicity of the name "Jim" contrasts with the pretense of "Leonidas." And "Smiley" has a connotation of optimism. These names, along with other aspects of the story, led one scholar, Paul Smith, to make an interpretation in Satire Newsletter that seems a bit farfetched, but is sufficiently interesting to merit the attention of anyone studying the story. Smith saw ' 'Jumping Frog'' as a retelling of the great legends of pilgrims on a quest for knowledge and spiritual salvation. These pilgrims usually traveled from east to west, from a settled and familiar place to a land where there was much to be discovered. Smith saw the story's nameless narrator as one of these pilgrims. Leonidas W. Smiley, according to Smith, represents the legendary Fisher-King, wounded, impotent, and lost in the Waste Land. Leonidas was the name of the king of ancient Sparta, and a minister is, in a phrase used in the Bible, a fisher of men. The name Smiley, Smith added, "suggests that in him the hopes of the land are invested and in his rejuvenation rests the chance to turn the waste land into the smiling land it once was." Simon Wheeler is, in Smith's view, an enchanter and a spinner of tales; his tale holds the clue to Leonidas W. Smiley's disappearance. If the letters "o" and "s" are dropped from "Leonidas," the remaining letters can be rearranged into "Daniel," and the "W" stands for "Webster." The king, therefore, has been turned into a frog, just as in the original Fisher-King tale, Smith asserted. And because Daniel Webster, the man, was a politician, the transformation symbolizes how practical politics have replaced religious idealism in American life. A further sign of the nation's decay is that the minister's last name has been taken over by a compulsive gambler. It may seem a bit much to find religious allegory in the humorous tale of a gambler and his frog, but Smith contended that "however much a humorist Mark Twain was, he was aware of this tale's tragic significance." Smith's interpretation, whether one finds it valid or not, is yet another indication of the riches that readers can mine from "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Source: Trudy Ring, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

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Many writers of the era penned 'frame stories,1 commonly set in the southwestern United States, showing supposedly sophisticated and cultured Easterners encountering less polished characters on the frontiers of the expanding nation,"

Lawrence R. Smith Smith is an educator, editor, and poet. In the following essay, he discusses how Simon Wheeler is a "vernacular" hero with many qualities of a ' 'trickster,'' and how the story is a satiric piece of literature, rather than simply a clever tale. Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" has been at the center of a critical controversy in recent years. This controversy focuses on one major question. Is the story satiric, with Simon Wheeler as a deadpan trickster making fun of the narrator, or is it simply a wild yarn told by a mindless yokel? Interpretations and claims for the story have varied widely. Some have argued that the ' 'Jumping Frog'' is the summation of Twain's faith in frontier democracy, while others have held that it is no more than an amusing story, told in an "exquisitely absurd" manner. A close examination of the structure and the component parts of the story itself, rather than argumentation in the abstract realms of cultural history and philosophy, indicates that the ' 'Jumping Frog" is a great deal more than a yarn well told. Furthermore, it is more than a simple celebration of "vernacular" heroes and frontier democracy. Twain not only transcends the tradition of the Southwestern humorous frame story, from which the ' 'Jumping Frog" is derived, he also passes beyond any narrow ideological statement. He has attempted to create a work that is broad and all-encompassing in its scope. In the encounter between the narrator and Simon Wheeler, Twain sets up a confrontation between the false and the true. As it happens, this is

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the classic confrontation between the "Whig gentleman" and the "vernacular" character. However, even this factor is not as vital to the meaning of the story as the larger conflict between the false and the true. It is Twain's main purpose to define and explore just what is true and valuable about Simon Wheeler and the qualities he represents. Relatively little time is spent in the deflation of the pretentious narrator; most of the story concerns Jim Smiley, his animals, and the stranger. It is here that Twain, through Simon Wheeler, creates an American heroic ideal. This ideal cannot be defined by such limiting terms as "vernacular," "frontier," "rural," or "western." The names of Smiley's two heroic animals, Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, reinforce the broadness and lack of regionality in Twain's vision. Yankee shrewdness and the East, conveyed by recalling the legendary Daniel Webster, are as much a part of the ideal Twain is defining as the frontier democracy represented by Andrew Jackson. Moreover, even the idealistic amalgam created by the Webster and Jackson images, and even the ideals represented by the optimistic gambler himself, are tempered by Smiley's deception at the hands of the stranger. What results from the whole tale is a synthesis of the best American traits: shrewdness, a spirit of enterprise and aspiration in Jim Smiley and his animals, and in the stranger the skeptical pragmatism necessary to keep the other characteristics within a useful and realistic framework. Simon Wheeler, as an American Homer, sings the praises of these heroes and the ideals they embody. Even if the narrator could never recognize these men or the traits for which they stand as heroic, Twain certainly does. The ' 'Jumping Frog'' could be described as the ultimate example of a genre of Southwestern humor, both in its complexity and in its sophistication. The tradition of a rural character duping and deflating the pretentious, smug city gentleman has been multiplied into an ingenious system of layers: a trick within a trick within a trick. Simon Wheeler tells the story of Jim Smiley, a trickster himself, being tricked by a stranger, and at the same time Wheeler makes a fool of the frame narrator. Twain is ripening the narrative "I" for his deflation from the moment the story begins. The ' 'gentleman'' obviously considers himself well-bred and eloquent, but such elaborate constructions as "In compliance with the request of a friend of mine" and "I hereunto append the result'' characterize the man as a prig. His attempts at stylistic flourish are pretentious; he is the stereotyped "genteel traveller"

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which Twain ridiculed throughout his career. It is noteworthy that the false quality of the narrator's style is immediately connected with the clergy, when we find that he is looking for a Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley. The fact that he has an inflated selfimage is further reinforced by the two stilted phrases associated with the mention of the clergyman:' 'a cherished companion of his boyhood" and "a young minister of the Gospel." Twain could have easily contrasted the genteel and the vernacular simply by stressing the difference between the names, ' 'Leonidas'' and ' 'Jim," but he chose to exaggerate the disparity by making the fictitious ' 'Leonidas'' a clergyman. Twain's lifelong association of the clergy, Protestant or Catholic, with the most foolish pretense and hypocrisy hardly needs comment. The narrator's attitude is also conveyed by his obvious condescension for Simon Wheeler, whom he describes as "good-natured," "garrulous," full of "winning gentleness and simplicity," "tranquil," "fat and bald-headed." In other words, Wheeler is depicted as the stereotyped yokel as seen through the eyes of polite urban society: homely, lazy, mindless, and most important, harmless good fun. However, even before the tale begins, Twain hints that this superior attitude may not be justified. Old Wheeler's influence soon renders the narrator a helpless captive: ' 'he backed me into a corner and blocked me there with a chair." The old timer is far from tranquil and passive. His irresistible presence is reminiscent of [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge's ancient mariner's hold over the unwary wedding guest. The narrator further displays his lack of perception and his misapplied condescension in evaluating the yarn and Simon Wheeler's narrative manner. He calls the Jim Smiley story insignificant, "monstrous," "queer," and yet its implications, both for him and for American society as a whole, are monumental. He also finds the unemotional delivery of the old timer amusing, in fact, "exquisitely absurd." However, this only indicates that he has not recognized the traditional deadpan delivery of the rural character, and thus is properly ripe for being taken in. It should also be noticed that the narrator only thinks the manner of the telling ' 'absurd," not the tale itself, and thus is unaware that Simon Wheeler is making fun of his ignorance of country life. The old miner's attribution of impossible characteristics to Daniel Webster the frog, and nevertheless convincing the narrator that they are normal, becomes his masterpiece of satirical oneupmanship.

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Twain demonstrates Wheeler's awareness and his satirical nature at the beginning of the yarn. These qualities had to be established before the significance of the Jim Smiley story could be perceived. Simon Wheeler seems to fit the narrator's condescending characterization as he starts his tale with a digression, and continues with a long-winded list of examples of Jim Smiley's willingness to bet. However, he does not wait long before he launches his first barb. When we hear that Jim Smiley went to Parson Walker's ' 'camp meetings" regularly in order to bet, we are puzzled. Does he bet on the length of the sermon, the number of conversions, or the number of furtive defections? Yet the ambiguity works well, because any interpretation is at the expense of Parson Walker and the clergy in general. It is only as Wheeler continues with the story of the straddlebug that we realize that Parson Walker has been included in a long list of animals, hierarchically arranged by size and importance, with the good parson only slightly above the bugs. Smiley's bet that Mrs. Walker will not recover from her grave illness, after the Parson's pious platitudes "thank the Lord for his inf nit mercy" and "with the blessing of Prov'dence," only reinforces the mockery. At first glance this satiric jab at the clergy may seem gratuitous, but one has only to remember that the pretentious interloper, the narrator, is searching for a/?ev. Leonidas W. Smiley. Furthermore, the narrator has been more than a little vain and pompous about his pious attitude toward the "young minister of the Gospel." The "simple" Simon Wheeler has already turned the tables on the man who had been so confident about his superiority. The old timer could hardly help being aware that jokes at the expense of the clergy, especially the sardonic joke about the death of the Parson's wife, would be highly unacceptable to the listener, who considers himself polite and well-bred. There should be no question as to whether this is Wheeler's humor or Twain's, because the mouthpiece for the author's satire is clearly aware of what he is doing.... Source: Lawrence R. Smith, "Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog': Towards an American Heroic Ideal," in Mark Twain Journal, Volume XX, No. 1, Winter, 1979, pp. 15-17.

Paul Schmidt In the following excerpted essay, Schmidt asserts that the satire in ' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'' is pointed at the narrator (Mark Twain) rather than Simon Wheeler, who emerges as the superior character that Twain supposes himself to be.

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he tradition of a rural character duping and deflating the pretentious, smug city gentleman has been multiplied into an ingenious system of layers: a trick within a trick within a trick."

In the encounter between Mark Twain and Simon Wheeler which frames the story of' 'The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" we are, apparently, expected to agree with the narrator, Mark Twain, that the ' 'good natured, garrulous'' miner is a comic butt. Wheeler tells his story, according to Mark Twain, like a simpleton: He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned his initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity....

His blank seriousness, his vernacular language, and the seeming naivete with which his story personifies the frog, the asthmatic mare, and the bull pup would appear at first glance to be ample specification of provincial idiocy. Actually, of course, none of us is misled by this characterization, for we sense the play involved. The Westerner, Wheeler, is engaged in his traditional role of taking in the pompous Easterner. We are, indeed, so familiar with the devices of American humor that we are likely to underestimate how much Clemens accomplishes with them—deadpan, tall tale, and all the rest. To plunge below the innocently smiling surface of the story is to realize that we are engaged in a complex comic business and one which turns upon issues of great scope and vitality. That business is traditionally described as burlesque, the reduction of the high to the low. The butt of this humor is the narrator himself,' 'Mark Twain,'' and what he represents. With his ostentatious formality, his pretentious language, and, above all, his preconceptions as to what this western miner is, he

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If Wheeler is a seed dolt, he is so only from the point of view of the genteel 'Mark Twain,' the point of view which is Clemens' ultimate object of satire in this story."

is obviously not to be identified with the author at all. He has been "commissioned," he says, to ask about a friend's "cherished companion," a companion who is a "minister of the Gospel," and if Wheeler will help him out he promises to be ' 'under many obligations." Punctilio jealously guards the distance between this eastern visitor and his Calaveras County host; a jaundiced patronage is apparent in his mention of Wheeler's shabby surroundings—a ' 'dilapidated tavern'' in a' 'decayed mining camp." "Mark Twain" is, in short, the type genteel, ripe with overbearing sophistication. If Wheeler is a seedy dolt, he is so only from the point of view of the genteel' 'Mark Twain," the point of view which is Clemens' ultimate object of satire in this story. This deliberate management of point of view is both an outgrowth of the traditions of southwestern humor in which Clemens worked and a sharp and distinctive departure from them. In earlier southwestern sketches and stories the frame and narration in the first person were standard equipment, but in the frame the author was, in contrast with Clemens here, fully identified with the narrator, and this author-narrator was serenely convinced of his refined superiority to the vernacular-speaking characters who appeared in the story proper. The narrator described the low life of the Crackers, Suckers, and Buckeyes with a condescension ranging from the amused tolerance of A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes to the contempt of Johnson J. Hooper's stories of the rascal Simon Suggs. The function of the frame, with its elegant diction and elevated taste, was to disinfect the author from contamination by the vernacular life he presented. This narrative attitude derives in large outline from the Enlightenment celebration of the picturesque and its nineteenth-century heir, the local-

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color story, wherein the author is typically posed as an aristocrat edified by pastoral reflections on the lower classes, indulgent with rural antics, or, if the humble scene is pathetic, Olympian in pity. (Hawthorne's Town Pump sketches are conceived in this manner.) When such condescension is taken over into southwestern humorous sketches it collides head-on with the author's genuine admiration for the low characters in the story within the frame. Thus the sophistication which T. B. Thorpe adopts in the frame of "The Big Bear of Arkansas" is belied by the burlesque of sophistication in the story proper. Where the author moves into closer sympathy with vernacular speech and character, as George Washington Harris does in his Sut Lovingood sketches, the frame and the lofty narrator tend to disappear. In "The Jumping Frog" Clemens hit upon a brilliant resolution of this confusion. Not only does he sharply dissever the point of view of his narrator, ' 'Mark Twain," from his own; he goes even farther and takes on this sophisticated narrator with his local-colorist assumptions as an object of satire. This technical innovation with its accompanying insight accounts for much of the high distinction of this story and of Clemens' humor generally. It involves much more than the simple addition of another character to his satiric targets; when he takes on the moralizing narrator, what falls within the purview of his burlesque is nothing less than the entire point of view of the local-colorist. Clemens has moved his sights up from the simple dandy, or shyster, or circuit rider, who had figured in American humor from its beginnings, and leveled them on the genteel version of the Enlightened traveler and belle esprit a representative nineteenth-century American rich in official and accepted attitudes. In Clemens' earliest published sketch, "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter," the genteel butt has only the crudest of pretensions—fancy dress and a few mannerisms; he is an oversimplified dude.' The Jumping Frog'' gives us a more searching view. In the "Mark Twain" of this story a whole culture gone to seed in gentility is brought into the balance. With his unctuous formality of speech, his invidious amusement, and with the whole range of reference into which he proposes to fit Wheeler, he is consciously realized to his very fingertips and riddled with satire. He struts in front of Wheeler with an insufferably patronizing air and, perhaps as a consequence of this egotism, with an almost paranoiac distrust of others. He had, he says, a "lurking suspicion" that he must be on guard against the effronteries of the western vernacular.

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He is prepared to find Wheeler's story "interminable" and "ridiculous." ("Hostility," as [Rainer Maria] Rilke says,' 'is our first response.'') He sees Wheeler's manner and story as an "infamous" attempt which "blockades" him in the corner and bores him "to death." This ' 'Mark Twain'' is more than a mere snob. The assumptions which govern his reception of Wheeler are those of an eastern traveler in the West, the assumptions which make up the complicated Enlightenment case of Civilization versus Nature, England and the Continent versus America, Boston versus the West. It is the paradoxical view of a refined (or jaded) culture pitted against a boorish (or naively noble) nature. As an inhabitant of the Wild West, Wheeler is viewed by "Mark Twain" as a reversion proper to the American frontier. In response to the pulls of this primitive environment the Westerner is expected to become a rude, uncultivated barbarian. Hence Wheeler is presented as maundering through his idiotic tale, unable to hold his ' 'simple'' mind up to the refined level of his genteel visitor. Harriet Martineau had been shocked at the vulgarity of western table manners, Charles Dickens had been disgusted that the residents along the Mississippi River fought like bloodthirsty savages, and now ' 'Mark Twain'' is sure that Simon Wheeler is a fool. Once we see the narrator and this genteel localcolorist view of the Westerner as the target of Clemens' satire, the ostensible values of the story are reversed in characteristic burlesque fashion. Far from being a "good natured, garrulous old" idiot, as ' 'Mark Twain'' would lead us to suppose, Wheeler emerges as the initiator of the satire—the teller of the tall tale. He deliberately assumes the role of an unconscious barbarian as a play upon his visitor's preconceptions and with the intention of turning the tables on him. Contrary to ''Mark Twain's'' picture of him as "far from imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story," Wheeler is fully aware that his manner is comic and that he is clowning when he treats the frog in his story like a prima donna. He poses as stupid in order to ridicule what his genteel auditor, "Mark Twain," projects on the vernacular Westerner, in order to show how ridiculously inappropriate the stereotype of the western barbarian is and how wrong the genteel values are which led to its imposition. The purpose of Wheeler's "impressive earnestness"—the tradi-

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tional pokerface—becomes clear: it prevents his giving away his hand, his satire on the genteel ' 'Mark Twain,'' and the role of outlandish stupidity he is assuming. His pose of "sincerity" and the story he tells are consciously designed, as both Clemens and Wheeler are aware, to take in his presumptuous listener. "Mark Twain" is the unconscious character in the frame, and he is the comic b u t t . . . . Source: Paul Schmidt, "The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler," in The Southwest Review, Vol. XLI, No. 3, Summer, 1956, pp. 270-77.

Sources Baender, Paul. "The 'Jumping Frog' as a Comedian's First Virtue," Modern Philology Vol. LX, no. 3, February, 1963, pp. 192-200. Krause, S. J.' 'The Art and Satire of Twain's 'Jumping Frog' Story," American Quarterly, Vol. XVI, no. 4, Winter, 1964, pp. 562-76. Smith, Paul.' 'The Infernal Reminiscence: Mythic Patterns in Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,"' Satire Newsletter, Vol. 1, no. 2, Spring, 1964, pp. 41-44.

Further Reading Cuff, Roger P. "Mark Twain's Use of California Folklore in His Jumping Frog Story," Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 65, April, 1952, pp. 155-9. Cuff traces Twain's use of the folklore of the California Gold Rush in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Lewis, Oscar. The Origin of' 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Book Club of California, 1931, 27 p. Lewis outlines the history of this story, "from its origins in the mining-camps of the Sierra foothills during the early days of the Gold Rush to the time Mark Twain gave it world-wide fame." Morrissey, Frank R. "The Ancestor of the 'Jumping Frog,'" The Bookman, Vol. LIII, no. 2, April, 1921, pp. 143-5. Morrissey recounts a tale about a man and his trained grasshopper, claiming that it is a prototype for Twain's story about Jim Smiley and Dan'l Webster.

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Children of the Sea Edwidge Danticat 1993

First published in the October, 1993, issue of Short Fiction by Women under the title "From the Ocean Floor,'' ' 'Children of the Sea'' was also included in Edwidge Danticat's 1995 short story collection Krik? Krak! The story of a young couple separated by political strife in Haiti, it received positive attention from critics as did the book, and the author quickly gained a reputation as one of the most promising writers in the United States. The tragic story, which concerns a doomed fate of a young couple, concerns many of the issues Danticat addresses in her other stories and in her novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was published in 1994. A native of Haiti, Danticat writes almost exclusively about the country's people, particularly its women, who during the 1980s suffered at the hands of a dictator, Papa Doc Duvalier, as well as from poverty and violence. The story was inspired by the author's conversations with "boat people," as the refugees are sometimes known, who had made their way to Providence, Massachusetts. "Children of the Sea'' has been commended for the way in which it blends political concerns with the emotional lives of the characters, thereby putting a human face on the suffering that many Westerners have only read about in the newspapers. Written in the alternating viewpoints of the young man and woman, the reader experiences the situation from both characters' perspectives. Through this technique, Danticat demonstrates the danger inherent in any choice a Haitian makes, whether it involves standing up to the gov-

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ernment and trying to gain political asylum in the United States, or complying with the regime's demands even if it means betraying others through silence.

Author Biography Brought up in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Edwidge Danticat has had firsthand experience with many of the harrowing events she relates in her stories. Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital city, on January 19,1969. Four years later her parents immigrated to the United States, leaving their young daughter behind. She rejoined them in 1981, and the family settled in Brooklyn, New York. She felt somewhat like an outsider at school, and she took refuge in her isolation by writing about her homeland. As a teenager, she began writing the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, which became her first published work in 1994. Danticat's parents wanted their daughter to become a nurse and sent her to a specialized high school in New York City, but by the time she graduated she had decided to concentrate on writing. She attended Barnard College in New York City, receiving her B.A. in 1990, and followed up with an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brown University in 1993. Breath, Eyes, Memory served as her master's thesis and was received warmly by the critics. Krik? Krak.', the collection of short stories which includes ' 'Children of the Sea'' appeared in 1995 to similar acclaim. The collection was nominated for the National Book Award, and the author was named one of the best young American novelists by Granta magazine the following year. In her short career, Danticat has been praised for her lyrical prose and has been compared to Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple. Due to the fact that Danticat's writing has thus far focused on the experiences of Haitians and Haitian-Americans, some have begun to see her as a spokesperson for that community. It is a role that makes the young author uncomfortable. As she told New York Times reporter Garry Pierre-Pierre, "I don't really see myself as the voice for the Haitian-American experience. There are many. I'm just one." Danticat lives in New York where she teaches creative writing at New York University.

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Plot Summary The story opens with an unnamed narrator, a young Haitian revolutionary, thinking of his girlfriend. He is on a small boat that has set sail for Miami, Florida. He is going into exile because he is wanted by the Haitian government. These details are disclosed by the young woman, who is the second narrator of the story. While her lover has left the country, she remains behind with her mother and father. The man and woman tell their stories through a series of letters. Though they cannot mail these letters, they are writing to appease their loneliness while they are away from one another. When they are reunited, they will feel as if they have not been apart. In Haiti the young man, a university student, was a member of a youth federation that protested the dictator and called for a new government. He fled the country when the secret police, known as the Tonton Macoutes, cracked down on his group. The other members have been killed by the army, and even more students were shot while demonstrating for the return of their friends' bodies. One woman, Madan Roger, a neighbor of the young woman's family, returned with only_the head of her son.

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The young man speaks of the difficulties of life aboard the ship: the vomiting, the temperature changes, the lack of privacy, the shortage of food. He dreams that he has died and gone to heaven, only heaven is at the bottom of the sea. The young woman is also in heaven, but her father continues to keep them apart. The young woman's father does not approve of their relationship, thinking that the young man was not good enough. Now that the young man is gone, the father is still afraid that his daughter's connection with the revolutionaries will endanger their lives. One night soldiers beat Madan Roger in order to coerce her into naming her son's associates. The young woman and her mother think the father should go to Madan Roger's aid. But the father knows he can do nothing for his neighbor, and that it is impossible even to protect his own family. The father only wants to move to Ville Rose, which he thinks will be ' 'civilization'' compared to Port-au-Prince, a crowded and impoverished city. On board the ship a young teenager named Celianne gives birth to a dead baby. The passengers gossip about her, saying her parents kicked her out for having an affair, but the truth is much worse. One night the secret police came to her house and forced her brother, a revolutionary, to have sex with their mother. The soldiers then raped Celianne and arrested her brother. She cut her face with a razor so no one would know who she was, and then she escaped on the boat. Because the boat is leaking, the passengers are forced to throw their belongings overboard but Celianne will not throw her baby into the water In Ville Rose, the young woman's family decides to be honest with each other. The young woman tells her father of her love for the young man. Her mother tells her that the Tonton Macoutes had intended to arrest her because of her involvement with a member of the youth federation. But when the father hears of the plan, he bribes them with all the money he has as well as the family's house and land. The young woman does not know how to thank her father. On the radio, she hears her lover passed his university exams. On board the ship everything is tossed overboard. Celianne throws her baby into the sea and then jumps in herself. The young man is forced to throw away his notebook. Before doing so, he writes the last page which contains his final thoughts. He knows he is about to join the ' 'children of the sea," those who have escaped slavery to live in a world away from the earth and sky, and away from

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all the violence. He knows that even in death he will always remember his girlfriend. Right after the young woman thanks her father for saving her life, a black butterfly tells her the news about the boat. She hears on the radio that the soldiers are killing more people in Port-au-Prince, and she realizes that she cannot stay safely in Ville Rose forever. She sits under the banyan tree, which her mother tells her is holy, surrounded by black butterflies. She knows that the boat that sank off the coast of the Bahamas was her lover's. From where she sits the sea is hidden by the mountains, but she knows it will always be there, endless, like her love for him.

Characters Celianne Celianne is a young woman of fifteen who is on the boat with the first narrator. She is pregnant, rarely eats, and ' 'stares in space all the time and rubs her stomach." Celianne has been raped and impregnated by the soldiers who had come to her house to arrest her brother. During the voyage she gives birth to a girl who is stillborn. The child's silence underscores the symbolism of her mother's silence, which indicates that spiritually, Celianne is already dead. When she throws the baby's body into the sea, she jumps in after it and drowns.

Male narrator The male narrator's words are the first in the story. The reader never learns his name, but he reveals his circumstance to the reader through his writings. He is at sea after having fled his homeland, and he has left behind the woman he loves. As the story unfolds, more is learned about the young man from the other narrator in the story. He has left Haiti because he was a member of the "Radio Six," a group of young people who opposed the Haitian government and broadcast anti-government radio programs. He spends the entire duration of the story on a leaky boat escaping from Haiti to Florida. The young man's story is incomplete. The reader never learns his fate because he is forced to throw his diary, which contains his half of the story, overboard. The second narrator, the woman he has left behind, learns that another boat of refugees has been lost at sea. This strongly suggests that he has drowned.

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Female narrator The second narrator is a young woman who lives with her family in Haiti. She has been romantically involved with the young man on the boat, and as the story progresses she comes to understand how much she loves him. Her feelings are repressed because to love him would be dangerous and arouse the opposition of her father. She reveals little else about herself, but her presence in Haiti allows the reader to witness the tragedy inflicted upon the Haitian people by the dictatorial government. The fact that she simply relates these horrors with little emotion or reflection indicates how oppressed the country's people are. Many of them have been numbed into submission. Near the end of the story, however, the narrator tells her father that she loves the young man, proof that the political situation has failed to suppress the human spirit completely. "I think he should know this about me," she writes, ' 'that I have loved someone besides only my mother and father in my life." This realization indicates her psychological growth. At the end of the story, after fleeing the city for the relative safety of Ville Rose she realizes that the young man she loves has died at sea in his attempt to escape.

Topics for Further Study Find some other examples of epistolary novels and stories. Do you think diaries fit into this category? In ' 'Children of the Sea'' and other epistolary works, do you think the format heightens or detracts from the work's meaning? Investigate the role that the United States has played in Haitian politics during the 1980s and 1990s. What has been the United States's foreign policy regarding the country and what has been done to enforce it? Do you think the U.S. government has acted appropriately? Research what happens to refugees from Haiti and other Caribbean countries when they come to the United States. Where do many of them decide to live? Why do you suppose they choose to settle where they do?

Narrator's father The young woman's father is primarily concerned with the safety of his family. While the Tontons Macoutes threaten the neighbors and his wife urges him to intervene, he forces her to remain quiet. When he finds that his daughter has audiotapes of her boyfriend's anti-government radio programs, he loses his temper with her because he fears for her safety. He leads his family to Ville Rose, where they are safer than in the city. Although he is opposed to his daughter's involvement with the young man, he respects the young man's convictions. The father represents the actions and beliefs of the majority of the Haitian people. He wants to cause no trouble, not because he supports or believes in the government, but because he is afraid his family may be tortured or killed by the regime.

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Injustice prevails back home for the female narrator as well. The soldiers of Haiti rampage through the country, taking revenge on all the people who had opposed their authority during the short-lived Aristide administration. What they perceive as justice, however, is violent revenge that is

"Children of the Sea" follows two Haitian narrators in the tumultuous days following the coup that deposed President Aristide.

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One of the most important themes in ' 'Children of the Sea" is justice. From the reader's perspective, the overwhelming injustice of the narrators' situation is highlighted by the events the author chooses to recount in the story. A totalitarian dictator has made his country an unbearable place to live. People are killed for disagreeing, for speaking publicly, and for trying to protect their families. Even when the young man is forced to flee for his life on a boat, injustice prevails. His fellow passengers are so bent upon survival that for them, the only question of "justice" is whether they should throw the sick people off the boat to save themselves. The harsh conditions on the boat seem no better than the world they had left behind. The story's emotional power stems from its unrelenting portrayal of injustice that the reader understands to be more or less real.

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manifested in murder, rape, and incest. The young woman's father, no matter how strong his convictions, realizes that he cannot do little to prevail over the soldiers' sense of "justice," thus adding to the plight of the people by failing to come to the aid of his neighbor. Injustice is so pervasive and overwhelming in the society, that most have stopped assessing it and can do no more than try to save themselves.

Politics ' 'Children of the Sea,'' though in many ways a love story, is essentially an example of political writing. The characters' situations are forced upon them by the political situation of their country. Even simple acts, like the woman's parents having supported Aristide while he was in power, now put them in danger. In this way, Danticat uses storytelling to protest the injustice of a totalitarian regime. She wants readers to identify with her characters and be urged to feel outrage for the injustice they suffer. She also demonstrates how politics can become the most important factor in a person's life: politics can separate you from the ones you love, they can determine where you live, how your parents act toward you, and whether you live or die.

Violence and Cruelty The cruelty and vengeance of the military government of Haiti forms the backdrop of ' 'Children of the Sea." The Tonton Macoutes, the private army of the Duvalier regime that specialized in torture, public terror, and oppression, run wild in the streets after Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti, is forced out in a military coup. Aristide supporters are hunted down and killed, and members of a protest group known as the "Youth Federation'' are particularly in danger, though they have committed no violent acts themselves. However, no one is safe, as the second narrator informs us when she discusses the soldiers' violent practices and the bodies that lie in the streets. The soldiers rape Celianne, a cruel act that begets more violence when Celianne disfigures herself, then again when she commits suicide. On the boat, the cruelty that has forced the refugees to flee again manifests itself when they consider getting rid of the weaker people on the boat. Violence results in more violence, Danticat shows. By comparing the refugees, soon to drown, to the African slaves hundreds of years ago, themselves forced from their homeland through violence and cruelty, Danticat connects the horrific

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acts of the past to those of the present. Like the sea, which is "endless," and like the young woman's love for the drowned man, violence is shown also to be timeless.

Human Rights Related to the themes of violence and politics is the issue of human rights. The Western concept of human rights includes the right to free speech, to organize, to believe in democracy and religion, and not to live in fear from the government, among other things. The list of rights violated by the Tonton Macoutes in ' 'Children of the Sea'' encompasses almost every conceivable outrage. Their repression results in a culture of fear and powerlessness among the Haitians, where even the young woman's declaration of love for a political activist is in itself a political act. The Haitian people's right to protest, to be safe in their own homes, and to speak freely has been eliminated in the face of the Tonton Macoutes' cruelty. Less apparent in the story, but providing an ominous undertone, is the realization that had the boat actually reached Miami, the refugees most likely would not have been granted political asylum by the United States, an act that some would also consider a violation of human rights.

Style Point of View and Narration "Children of the Sea" is narrated in the first person by two distinct voices. The first belongs to a young man who is fleeing Haiti on a leaky boat. The second voice is that of the man's lover, a young woman who remains in Haiti with her family. The story is written in the form of letters from each of the characters to the other, a style known as ' 'epistolary," which is derived from the ancient Greek word meaning "message" or "letter." To underscore the danger of their respective situations, neither of the characters refers to each other by name. To do so would jeopardize their lives even more. Through their letters, which cannot be mailed, the reader learns of the characters' deepest thoughts, the ones they are afraid to voice. The characters' personalities are revealed by how they write and what they choose to write about. The man on the boat is primarily concerned with his current predicament and writes about the people around him and the experience of being at sea. The woman, conversely, remains in Port-au-Prince and

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tends to reminisce about the past more, since her situation is not as dire. Through her memories, the reader learns many of the background details of the story. The difference in their personalities is shown by the way each of them discusses their relationship. The young man speaks naturally about their intimacy; the woman is more shy and hesitating. This difference may also represent the cultural attitudes of their country.

Setting The two settings in the story, the middle of the sea and the island of Haiti, underscore the conflict in the story—that a couple in love has been separated by political upheaval. Across this distance there is no connection between the two main characters. Their separation has been absolute, though they try to bridge the gap with letters. But even these letters will never be read by the other person. Thus, the distance between the two lovers heightens the feeling of pathos (a sense of suffering) that permeates the story.

Symbolism ' 'Children of the Sea'' relies on a number of symbols for its narrative power; most notably is the sea itself. The man dreams of the sea as heaven. When the people of the boat drown, they join the hundreds of other slaves who have died and become "children of the sea." They are martyrs of a sort, and in the Christian tradition martyrs—those who die for their beliefs—go to heaven. Another symbol is Celianne's stillborn baby. Conceived by violence it is born dead, symbolizing that fact that cruelty does not beget life. The baby could also represent the crushed Aristide democracy, which was quelled by the military coup almost from the moment it began. In another symbolic interpretation, the dead child could also be said to represent the young couple's doomed relationship. Their love has forged an alliance between them, but political strife has torn them apart, effectively aborting their chance for happiness together. In an instance of foreshadowing, Celianne drowns herself when forced to abandon her dead child. This hints at the impending tragedy in which the rest of the passengers will drown. Again, this action symbolizes that the violence inflicted upon Celianne by the Tonton Macoutes has not only resulted in the death of her child, but also her own death. Not only does cruelty not beget life, Danticat demonstrates, it frequently begets more cruelty.

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At the end of the story the woman sits under a banyan tree, itself a symbol of holiness, and is surrounded by butterflies. Though they are black, a color that frequently represents death, the butterflies may also represent a bittersweet hope of eventual freedom. Love is endless, the young woman realizes, like the sea. But the sea, like love, is hidden from view by the mountains. She and others, symbolically then, will need to move mountains to see heaven—the sea—with their own eyes. The woman at this point, after publicly declaring her love for the man to her parents, represents the country's best hope for the restoration of justice.

Historical Context Haiti: The Early Years Although Danticat had been living in the United States for fourteen years by the time ' 'Children of the Sea" was first published, the story draws upon her experience of having spent her early years in Haiti. With generations of experience in poverty, dictatorship, and oppression, Haiti's population knows hardship well. ' 'Children of the Sea'' takes place in the turbulent mid-1980s, when the longstanding Duvalier dictatorship was toppled, and people's brief hopes for democracy were dashed by the military government which succeeded the dictator. Haiti shares a large island in the Caribbean Sea with the Dominican Republic. In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on this island, which he named Hispaniola, and found what he believed was an earthly paradise. In the seventeeth century, the French and the Spanish divided the island between them. Spain received the eastern half, which later became the Dominican Republic, and France took the western half. The French landowners used many Africans as slaves on their plantations, which produced sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton. In the 1790s, a black ex-slave named Toussaint Louverture led a revolution, and by 1801 the country had gained its independence and was the world's first black republic.

Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes However, for the next two centuries the country suffered from extreme poverty and misrule, and it was even occupied by United States Marines for twenty years in the early twentieth century. In 1957 a man named Francois Duvalier took power and ruled for fourteen years. Duvalier was known as

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Compare & Contrast 1980s: Before the fall of communism, the United States largely bases its foreign policy on a country's relationship with the Soviet Union. Especially in Latin America, the U.S. government supports corrupt dictatorships in Guatemala, Chile, and the Dominican Republic, simply because they are not communist.

Haiti in the 1980s: The country's infant mortality rate is 124 per thousand. United States in the 1980s: The country's infant mortality rate is 31 per thousand.

1990s: Communism is no longer viewed as a threat to Western-style democracy, and American foreign policy reflects this shift. Dictators like Manuel Noriega of Panama are deposed because of their involvement in drug trafficking,

Haiti in the 1980s: The average life expectancy is 48 years.

"Papa Doc" because he had practiced medicine before going into politics. He was a brutal ruler who jailed or killed his opponents and stole money from ordinary Haitians and from the international aid funds that gave money to the country. The United States government supported Duvalier because he was not a communist.

his family and friends had been accustomed. While the people of Haiti starved, Jean-Claude and his wife entertained lavishly and spent much time out of the country on vacations in Europe or the United States. Those who protested the unequal distribution of wealth were killed by the Tonton Macoutes. As a result of Haiti's poverty and violence, many Haitians began to leave the country and look for a better life in the Bahamas, Jamaica, or the United States.

Papa Doc had his own private army called the Tonton Macoutes, whose responsibility was to keep an eye on dissenters. The name comes from the Creole term meaning "Uncle Knapsack." Creole, a combination of French and African dialects, is the language spoken by the people of Haiti. "Uncle Knapsack'' refers to a monster in Haitian folklore who steals children from their parents and hides them in his knapsack. The Tonton Macoutes wanted the people of Haiti to fear them, so they chose a name that would inspire horror in anyone familiar with the folk tale. There was good reason to fear the Tonton Macoutes, for they would often kill people or burn their houses for no reason other than to remind people that they were in charge.

Baby Doc and Revolution After Papa Doc died in 1971, his son JeanClaude (known as Baby Doc) assumed power. Baby Doc maintained control over the country and continued to live the rich and lavish lifestyle to which

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and democratically elected leaders like Aristide are restored to power.

United States in the 1980s: The average life expectancy is 72 years.

In 1985, however, things began to fall apart for Duvalier. During a student demonstration in the impoverished city of Gonaives, the Tonton Macoutes shot into the crowd, killing four teenagers. This angered the people greatly, and demonstrations soon began all across the country. Radio stations, some affiliated with the Catholic Church and some illegal, broadcast anti-government programs. As Duvalier intensified the repression, the United States withdrew its support. Duvalier fled to France in January, 1986, and the army assumed power. The Haitian people were ecstatic. The army officers who took over, though, were less than the embodiment of democracy. Many of them had been close to Duvalier and were more interested in assuming power themselves than in improving conditions in the country. The Tonton Macoutes were officially disbanded, but many of

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them continued to terrorize the country. Thousands of Haitians began to leave the country, fleeing to Miami on small boats. Many of these refugees died at sea.

Aristide and the Refugees In 1990 the country was again racked by antigovernment demonstrations, and the military government was forced to hold elections. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a priest who had worked extensively with Haiti's poor, was elected president. However, he only served eight months before the military overthrew him and forced him to flee to the United States. The Haitian exodus, temporarily stemmed by public enthusiasm for Aristide, returned in full force. The United States told Haiti that all refugees would be "repatriated," or sent back to Haiti, but the desperate people continued to come. Many people felt that America's refusal to accept Haitian refugees was hypocritical. They held that the United States welcomed refugees from Cuba because they were being saved from communism. Conditions in Haiti were just as bad or worse than in Cuba, the Haitians claimed, and they should be granted political amnesty as well, or they would surely die. After much public pressure, President Clinton sent troops to Haiti in 1994 to restore President Aristide to office. The military leaders who ran Haiti left the country and Aristide returned in October. Although Haiti continues to be the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, there is much hope among Haitians that real democracy will soon improve their lives. Outside of Haiti, too, the question of justice is raised. In addition to the repression in their country, Haitian refugees are not welcomed in any country. The United States, well-known as a haven for refuge-seekers, turns the Haitians back at sea while they welcome Cubans. In the Bahamas, a woman tells the first narrator in ' 'Children of the Sea," "they treat Haitians like dogs. To them, we are not human .. . even though we had the same African fathers who probably crossed these same seas together."

Critical Overview The collection Krik? Krak!, in which "Children of the Sea'' appeared, garnered impressive reviews by critics. The title of the book comes from the Haitian

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tradition of the storyteller who asks the audience ' 'Krik?'' to see if anyone wants to hear a story. The reply, "Krak!" indicates that audience's enthusiasm and willingness to listen. In many reviews, "Children of the Sea" has been singled out as one of Danticat's most poignant and effective stories. Like most of her work, it concerns the lives of ordinary Haitians and bears witness to the tragedies she witnessed firsthand as a child living in the country. Danticat tells Renee Shea in Poets and Writers that the story is about the "need to be remembered." Some of the refugees Danticat had spoken with following their arrival in the United States, particularly the women, "feared that no one would know they had been alive, no one would speak of them'' had they drowned in the sea during their voyage. Joanne Omang in Washington Post Book World calls the story "virtually flawless" and states that "All the island's troubles are braided seemlessly into these letters." Likewise, Kimberly Hebert calls it Krik? Krak!' s ' 'most powerful story'' in a review for Quarterly Black Review. Shea writes in Belles Lettres that the story is "stunning in the power of both the tale and language." She elaborates that Danticat changed the title to emphasize the Middle Passage of the slave ships and quotes the author: "That journey from Haiti in the 1980s is like a new middle passage. . . . I often think that if my ancestors are at the bottom of the sea, then I too am a part of that."

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the imagery in ' 'Children of the Sea." At the age of twenty-six, young for a writer, Edwidge Danticat has many honors credited to her name. Aside from publishing two books, the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and a collection of short stories, Krik? Krak!, she has also received much critical acknowledgment. Her novel earned her recognition by the New York Times as one of the ' 'thirty young artists to watch," and it was nominated for a National Book Award in 1995. Krik? Krak! drew as many rave reviews; Publishers Weekly

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writes that it "confirm[s] Danticat's reputation as a remarkably gifted writer." Danticat, who emigrated from Haiti to the United States when she was twelve years old, writes about life in her country and its people. The Haiti that emerges from Danticat's fiction is the one in which she grew up, a country under the rule of dictators Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, known as "Baby Doc." The Duvaliers governed Haiti by dint of oppression and cruelty. Their brutal secret police—the Tonton Macoutes—committed many atrocities against the Haitian people. The Duvalier regime was not overthrown until 1986, but the political situation suffered upheaval until well into the 1990s. Haitian writers from the mid-1940s on have often found themselves, like Danticat, far from home. Given the restrictive and violent dictatorship that has controlled Haiti and its people, many Haitian writers have not been allowed to express themselves freely in their own country. Danticat, even though she lives in the United States, has stated that she doubted not only her ability to write, but she also had the feeling that it might be a dangerous profession. A strong part of the culture, however, is its tradition of storytelling. The title of Danticat's

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collection bears witness to her rich heritage of storytelling and is explained in the epigram: ' 'We tell the stories so that the young ones will know what came before them. They say Krik? We say Krak! Our stories are kept in our hearts." Danticat follows in another tradition: that of writers from other cultures living in the United States who give voice to the sorrows and the joys that have shaped their experiences. The works of Jamaica Kincaid, who was born in Antigua, highlight the anger that West Africans feel about their past enslavement. Toni Morrison, though born in the United States, explores the issue of oppression through the institution of slavery. Perhaps most similar to Danticat's writings are those of Julia Alvarez, whose family fled from the Trujillo dictatorship and the Dominican Republic. Alvarez, like Danticat, revisits her homeland in her work and describes the horrors of living under a regime of terror and examines how the bonds of family are perhaps strengthened by such circumstances. Some of the power of Danticat's fiction lies in its shocking subject matter; she often depicts violent death, incest, rape, and extreme poverty. Danticat fills her stories with characters who exist within a painful external world. Like Haitian writers who

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What Do I Read Next? Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), Danticat's novel about four generations of Haitian women as they struggle in their homeland and in the United States. Told through the eyes of Sophie Caco, the novel has been commended for its lyrical prose which counterpoints its dire subject matter. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) by Julia Alvarez, a native of the Dominican Republic. Four young sisters arrive in the United States from the Dominican Republic and become increasingly Americanized as they grow up. Now adults, each one comes to term with her heritage and learns to integrate it with her identity. Reef (1995) by Romesh Gunesekera, a coming-

have come before her, Danticat battles against the despair of the past and the pain of exile while also describing a culture in which people learn, love, and laugh. Despite growing up in a society which often seeks to silence women, Danticat has found her voice. She has found a way to tell the stories of her country's men and women and in a modern voice that brings attention to the problems of the past. "Children of the Sea," the first story in the collection Krik? Krakf, tells of young lovers separated by the political situation. He is a revolutionary who has been forced to flee Haiti on a small, rickety boat or risk his life at the hands of Duvalier's secret police. The young woman he wants to marry remains with her family in Haiti where she continues to witness the ever-present horrors. The hero of the story, who is never given a name, epitomizes the choice that so many Haitians have faced over the years: exile or imprisonment. The heroine, also nameless, exemplifies the people who stay behind but must pay the price of silence. The story is in the epistolary style, which means that it is written as a series of letters between the two main characters. Though they cannot send these letters, their telling of stories in the ' 'Krik? Krak!''

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of-age novel also praised for its lyricism despite its stark political backdrop. A poor houseboy on the island of Ceylon, soon to become Sri Lanka, learns to appreciate the simplicity of life. Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) by Paule Marshall, an author whose influence Danticat has praised. A girl whose parents are from Barbados struggles amidst the poverty of Brooklyn to find her identity. The Comedians by Graham Greene, a novel about the Duvalier regime and its attack dogs, the Tonton Macoutes, which was banned in Haiti immediately upon publication.

method lessens the pain of separation for them. ' 'When we see each other again, it will seem like we lost no time," one of them writes. Expressing their stories through writing rather than speaking also symbolizes their political oppression, since their separation is caused by their inability to speak freely in Haiti. The exchange of ideas must be secretive. The Haitians understand this and break their code of silence only when secrecy loses its power to affect change. The mother tells her daughter ' 'sometimes you have to choose between your father and the man you love'' after the young man has gone into exile. Conversely, Madan Roger holds on to her secret and never reveals the names of her dead son's associates to the secret police. The young woman, while not hiding her relationship with the young man, does not tell her father of their love until the issue has become moot. Even when she does speak the truth, her father does not acknowledge the secret: "he looked me straight in the eye and said nothing to me . . . papa just turned his face away like he was rejecting my very birth." The young man is the only person who cannot keep his thoughts to himself. His involvement with a revolutionary group, ' 'the Radio Six," provided him with a forum where "we could talk about what we wanted from government,

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the restrictive and violent dictatorship that has controlled Haiti and its people, many Haitian writers have not been allowed to express themselves freely in their own country,"

what we wanted for the future of our country." Though he escaped from Haiti, he will die because of his boldness. The young woman's father is the person who best understands the importance of secrecy. He wants his daughter to get rid of her radio show tapes because they would incriminate her. When Madan Roger is attacked by the secret police, he refuses to go to her aid because he knows he cannot protect anyone. While he is presented as a man too willing to submit to the injustices of Duvalier's regime— ' 'you can let them kill somebody because you are afraid, they are the law. it is their right,'' he says — he does have a reason for being so paralyzed. The mother tells the daughter that the Tonton Macoutes were ' 'going to peg [her] as a member of the youth federation and then take [her] away." To save his daughter's life, the father bribed them with the family's money, home, and property. Her lover, unable to keep secrets, sacrifices himself to his beliefs. But her father, who keeps even this a secret, "gave everything he had" to save someone else. While the father is willing to find a way to live in Haiti, the young man, though he does not "want to be a martyr," cannot keep his feelings to himself. The young woman is torn by the polar opposites the two men represent. At first she feels frustration at her lack of self-determination and her separation from her lover; then she takes out this frustration on her father instead of on the true culprit, Duvalier. After she learns of her lover's death, however, she gets ready to take on a more active role in her future as she acknowledges "i don't know what's going to happen, but i cannot see staying here forever." A young pregnant girl traveling on the same boat as the revolutionary further represents the dilemma of secrecy. The other passengers speculate

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that Celianne was thrown out by her parents for having an affair, but the truth is far worse. Her baby is the result of being raped by the Tonton Macoutes. Immediately afterward, Celianne ' 'cut her face with a razor so that no one would know who she was"; her desire to keep her secret is so strong that she is even willing to destroy her identity. Like the young woman's father, Celianne keeps silent about her experiences, allowing the people of Haiti to cast blame on her rather than on the oppressive regime. But unlike the young man, she did nothing to bring her fate upon herself; even though she was innocent, she pays the cost of keeping her secret with her life. The only alternatives for Haitians, represented by Celianne and the revolutionary, both can lead to death. In the face of such options, it makes more sense to give up the secrets in hopes of creating a society in which such secrets will no longer exist. As the lives of Haitians play themselves out against this backdrop of secrecy, it is fitting that the hidden world of the sea becomes the only place where the lovers can be together, at least spiritually. For the young man, the sea increasingly welcomes him. While he had first imagined he was "going to start having nightmares once we get deep at sea," he instead dreams of dying and going to heaven and heaven is at the bottom of the sea. By the time the ship is about to sink, however, he knows he will "live life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery." With these words he draws the link between Haitians under Duvalier's regime and the Africans who were forced from their homeland centuries ago. His speeches have hinted at this connection—"Yes, I am finally an African" because the sun has darkened his skin, the passengers go to the bathroom ' 'the same way they did on those slave ships years ago"—but only when he has finally given himself to the idea of death does he accept that he has been "chosen" for this destiny because it is the only way to escape oppression. The sea is a vast, open space, and though it is far away from the young woman, they both know the sea is "endless like my love for you." Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Jordana Hart Hart comments on the Influence of Haiti on Danticat's fiction, mentioning "Children of the Sea." More than anything else, the storytelling of the young Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat

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has given the world honest and loving portraits of Haitian people, both on the island and in the United States. She has smashed the numbing stereotypes created by a barrage of media accounts of Haitian poverty, misery and death. Danticat's debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, garnered international acclaim last year. In her new book, a collection of nine short stories called Krik? Krak!, she draws on her experience growing up in dictatorial Haiti as well as stories of Creole culture and myth. Danticat, 26, a teller of stories in the truest sense, takes us heart-pounding into a breathtaking Haiti, whose culture and people are so often diminished, even disfigured, in the writings of those who do not know and love the island. Of course, Danticat cannot avoid placing her tales within the brutal world of the tonton macoutes, Haiti's former thuggish soldiers, and the oppressive political system that until recently pushed tens of thousands of Haitians to flee the island by vessel— often only to meet their death or internment in a Florida camp. It is the details of everyday life, however, the depth of her characters and Danticat's own love and respect for her culture that make her stories at once disturbing yet beguiling. Like her first novel, these stories are mostly told from the perspective of women: her mother, whom she follows unseen along a New York City street only to find out she is a 'day woman,' a nanny caring for a white child; a young wife deeply in love with her husband, who kills himself by jumping out of a hot-air balloon because he's despondent that he cannot raise his family out of poverty. Danticat tells a couple of her best stories in two voices. The first one, "Children of the Sea," is told by a young woman and also by a politically active young man, her would-be lover, who is fleeing Haiti with 36 other "deserting souls" in a rickety boat. He writes to her about the experience in a journal: Once you have been at sea a couple of days, it smells like every fish you have ever eaten, every crab you have ever caught, every jelly fish that has ever bitten your leg. I am so tired of the smell. I am also tired of the way people on this boat are starting to stink. The pregnant girl, Celianne, I don't know how she takes it. She stares into space all the time and rubs her stomach.

With such detail, Danticat manages to place us in the midst of this terrifying voyage—the middle

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passage to the United States we have read about so often in news accounts—as the boat takes on water and the people are forced to throw even their most cherished belongings overboard to lighten the load. Celianne clutches her still-born infant to her chest, he says, refusing to give her up to the sea god, Agwe. In "New York Day Women," Danticat recounts with humor the intergenerational and cultural gaps that have developed between the older Haitian mother and her Americanized daughter, Suzette. The account is set off in unusual paragraphs, some only a sentence and statement long, as Suzette recalls her mother's quirks. "My mother . . . sews lace collars on my company Softball T-shirts when she does my laundry," Suzette recounts. "Why, you can't look like a lady when you play Softball?"—obviously a retort from her mother.

In "Nineteen Thirty-Seven," a story wrapped in haunting folklore about winged women who escape a Dominican massacre, a girl visits her mother in a Port-au-Prince prison, jailed for life for being a "lougarou, witch, criminal." The mother has been wrongly accused of killing a child with witchcraft. Before the prisoners go to sleep, the guards force them to throw cups of cold water on one another so that their bodies cannot generate enough heat to grow ' 'those wings of flames, fly away in the middle of the night, slip into the slumber of innocent children and steal their breath." In the storytelling tradition of Haiti, the children ask ' 'Krik?'' urging the stories to begin, and the elders reply ' 'Krak!'' and tell the fables ' 'so that the young ones will know what came before them." This is very much what Danticat, as a child and now as a writer, has done. Source: Jordana Hart, "Danticat's Stories Pulse with Haitian Heartbeat," in The Boston Globe, July 19, 1995, p. 70.

Edwidge Danticat with Renee H. Shea In the following interview, Danticat discusses the stories in her collection Krik! Krak!, including ' 'Children of the Sea.'' This epigraph sets the stage and tone for the nine stories of the heart by Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat in her recent collection entitled Krik? Krak! In these tales of the politics and people of Haiti, past and present, on their island home and in newly formed immigrant communities, she lures us not simply to

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read but to participate in the tradition of Krik? Krak! that she remembers from childhood: "Krik? Krak! is call-response but also it's this feeling that you're not merely an observer—you're part of the story. Someone says, 'Krik?' and as loud as you can you say, 'Krak!' You urge the person to tell the story by your enthusiasm to hear it." So compelling are these stories, filled with the myth and poetry of Haiti, that as one ends, it is hard not to call out a resounding, "Krak!" to keep the momentum of Danticat's storytelling going. Taken individually, several stories are stunning in the power of both the tale and language. ' 'Children of the Sea'' is told as a dialogue between two young lovers—one on a boat bound for Miami, the other reporting from Haiti on the horrors wrought by the TonTon Macoutes. The young man reports the desperate life of himself and the "thirty-six other deserting souls on this little boat" and the story-within-the-story of Celianne. Pregnant after a gang rape by the TonTon Macoutes, Celianne fled her accusing family, and when she gives birth aboard the boat to a still-born child, she refuses to give it up. Finally forced to throw the baby overboard, she follows by jumping into the sea. The young woman's story of her family's struggle in Haiti, the increasing violence, and the lengths her father finally goes to protect her are counterpoint. The nightmarish reality of the TonTon Macoutes is challenged by the fierce love of the two young people; the unnamed he wonders,' 'Maybe the sea is endless. Like my love for you," and she exclaims, ' 'i love you until my hair shivers at the thought of anything happening to you." The vividness of their "letters" belies the reality that only we can hear both voices. Will he survive? Will she? Will their written records? What will survive is memory, a collective spirit that the young man speculates may be ' 'life eternal, among the children of the deep blue sea, those who have escaped the chains of slavery to form a world beneath the heavens and the blood-drenched earth where you live." Danticat changed the original title of this story, "From the Ocean Floor," to "Children of the Sea'' to emphasize the link to the Middle Passage: "It's a very powerful image—from the ocean floor. No one knows how many people were lost on The Middle Passage. There are no records or graves— and the ocean floor is where our fossils are. That journey from Haiti in the 1980s is like a new middle

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passage. Not to romanticize it, but the comforting thing about death is that somehow all these people will meet. I often think that if my ancestors are at the bottom of the sea, then I too am part of that. So we are all children of the sea. There are no museums, no graves, really no place to visit—there's a timelessness about it"... ' 'It's so important for people to read things that somehow mirror their own experience. I remember when I was in junior high school and read Paule Marshall. Brown Girl, Brownstones was the first book that was similar to what we were going through. My father always had a desire to own property. He wanted to buy a house. We had to have something concrete, a piece of the country, a piece of the land—like the people in this novel: they wanted to have a brownstone. I had three brothers, and I'm the only girl. In most of my adolescence, that was okay, but I had to be in the kitchen with my mother, learning how to cook. Marshall's essay on 'kitchen poets' describes something very similar to when my mother's sisters would come over—their talking, the way they said things, their faces. It was so beautiful! I used to resent being in the kitchen with them because I wanted to be with the boys, but then I read Marshall's essay. She talks about doing her homework on the kitchen table while the women were talking about home, what was happening there, what they're doing—and just sort of soaking it in. She called it 'kitchen poetry.' After reading that, I didn't resent so much being in the kitchen. I felt like part of a sisterhood, and I remember feeling then that I didn't necessarily have to rebel."... Taken together, the stories in Krik? Krak! have a continuity derived from recurrent themes and motifs, yet they are more profoundly bound by a spiritual vision where "the warm sea air" and "the laughter of children'' coexist with the painful history of slavery and more recent violence: ' 'My idea was to have a progression. The first story would be '1937' and the last, historically, 'Caroline's Wedding.' We also go from Haiti to the New York stories. My editor and I chose them with that idea in mind. Just naturally from writing the stories over several years, some of the characters recurred, so that came together too. But we ended up with a different order because my editor thought that "Children of the Sea' is a story that's easy to get into; also, it has 'krik? krak!' in it, which introduces the idea of why to write the stories. The book was put together with the idea of the stories flowing together and complementing one another."

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Such interconnections, resonances, echoes, and blending are best described by Danticat's own image of braids in the final selection, ' 'Epilogue: Women Like Us,'' a poetic coda to the nine stories: "When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers." Recurring characters are one connection: the main character of "Between the Pool and the Gardenias" is the goddaughter of Lili from "A Wall of Fire Rising'' and the granddaughter of Defile, the alleged lougarou in "1937." When asked if not knowing Haitian myths and folklore makes it difficult to appreciate her work, Danticat calls on yet another connection in response: "I think more of the depths of emotion. The stories deal with humanity and what we all go through. Different people will walk away learning different things; there'll be differences even among people from Haiti." Generations of women strengthen these connections. Even death cannot break the line, as she writes in the Epilogue: ' "The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we all take to meet on the other side. What goddesses have joined, let no one cast asunder. With every step you take, there is an army of women watching over you. We are never any farther than the sweat on your brows or the dust on your toes." An image that recurs throughout Danticat's work is the butterfly as symbol of both continuing life and transformation. In "Dream of the Butterflies," a poetic vignette published in The Caribbean Writer in 1991, violence is juxtaposed with tenderness, danger with safety, and, finally, sheer hatred with pure love. She sees the redemptive butterfly as suggesting that hope triumphs even in the face of terrible loss: "There aren't that many legends in Haiti about butterflies, but I'm fascinated by the idea of transformation. I think in some ways we all think we could go from a caterpillar to a butterfly—that whole metamorphosis is a metaphor for life, especially a life of poverty or struggle because you hope

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that this is temporary and that one way or another, you'll get wings. It's the Christian ideal we grew up with that people are willing to suffer very much if that means one day they'll get their wings and fly. Haiti has such beautiful butterflies in all different colors." The most uncanny connections seem to assert themselves in the life of this author who bears witness: ' The year I wrote 'Children of the Sea' there were so many boating accidents; whole families would be wiped out. One woman I had read about was Marie Micheline, whose mother and daughter were on the boat with her. They all died." Danticat dedicated the original publication of this story as follows: ' 'In ancestral kinship, I offer this piece to Marie Micheline Marole, her daughters, and her granddaughters—three generations of women lost at sea." Coincidentally—or maybe not—another ' 'Marie Micheline'' played a key role in Danticat's life: "My cousin Marie Micheline taught me to read. I started school when I was three, and she would read to me when I came home. In 1987, when I was in France, there was a shooting outside her house—where her children were. She had a seizure and died. Since I was away from her, my parents didn't tell me right away. They were afraid I might have a reaction. But around that same time, I was having nightmares; somehow I knew. ' 'Marie Micheline was very dear to me. When I read about this woman who drowned, I was so struck that they had the same name."

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In Krik? Krak!, Danticat serves a "survival soup" of characters struggling to find a place of peace, a sliver of happiness, a glimmer of a brighter future amid terrorism and political chaos. Ultimately, it is in these stories that they find a moment of grace, stories that Danticat believes give people "a sense of the things that I have inherited." It's a rich inheritance—and one, we can be thankful, she generously shares. Source: Edwidge Danticat with Renee H. Shea, an interview in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 10, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 12-15.

Sources Hebert, Kimberly. "A Testament to Survival," in Quarterly Black Review, June, 1995, p. 6. Omang, Joanne. A review of Krik? Krak! in Washington Post Book World, May 14, 1995, p. 4. Pierre-Pierre, Garry. An interview in The New York Times, January 26, 1995, pp. Cl, C8.

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Shea, Renee H.' Traveling Worlds with Edwidge Danticat,'' in Poets and Writers, Vol. 25, No. 1, January-February, 1997, pp. 42-51.

Further Reading Ferguson, James. Papa Doc, Baby Doc. Haiti and the Duvaliers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. A good brief overview of Haitian history, concentrating on the Duvalier years (1957-1985). Perusse, Roland I. Haitian Democracy Restored 1991-1995. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995. A detailed play-by-play account of the events following Aristide's election in 1990, leading up to the restoration of his government in 1995. Danticat, Edwidge, and Renee H. Shea.' The Dangerous Job of Edwidge Danticat," in Callaloo, Vol. 19, no. 2, Spring, pp. 382-89. Focuses on Danticat's first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory. The author talks about some of the ideas behind her fiction, particularly the concept of' 'mother'' as it refers to a language and a person's homeland.

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The Devil and Tom Walker The Devil and Tom Walker was first published in 1824 as part of Washington Irving's collection of short stories Tales of a Traveller. The story was included in Part IV of the book, also known as the "Money-Diggers" series of stories. Gentleman Geoffrey Crayon, a fictional character created by the author, narrates the tale. He never refers to himself by name, however, but he states that the story has been a legend of the New England area for roughly a hundred years. Though the story has been widely read and enjoyed since its first appearance, the book Tales of a Traveller was poorly received by critics who complained that its writing was weak and unoriginal. The short story was a relatively new form of fiction at the time, and many of its conventions were still being defined by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Some critics have given this as a reason for the artistic failure of many of the collection's stories.

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Despite this negative reception, the story about an unpleasant man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for wealth is one of the works for which Irving is best remembered. Commonly referred to as a "comic New England Faust," the story bears many similarities to the German folktale of Faust, a man who trades his soul to the devil for a number of things, including love and money. Irving had travelled widely in Germany by the time he wrote ' "The Devil and Tom Walker,'' and it can be assumed that he was familiar with German Romantic writer Johann Goethe's version of the tale which was pub-

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lished in Goethe's novel Faust. More so than European versions of the tale, Irving instills the tale with the moral ideals common to New England in the early nineteenth century. In an area settled by Quakers and Puritans, religious piety was of utmost importance to citizens, and the lesson of Tom Walker's ruin illustrated the sorrow that would befall unscrupulous sinners. Some have said that the "Devil and Tom Walker'' was a well-known folktale in the New England area at the time, and Irving's retelling of it is a straightforward rendition of how he may have heard it from the region's Dutch inhabitants.

Author Biography Washington Irving is known as one of the first American authors to gain international recognition for his work. He is also a founder of the short story form. His first book, published in 1808, was Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others and was comprised of a variety of satiric pieces. His most famous early success was in 1809 with the publication of A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, which is the fictional history of the Knickerbocker family as told by the character of Diedrich Knickerbocker in the days when New York City was a colony of the Netherlands. Although Irving was renowned in his lifetime for his historical and biographical works, it was through his short stories, the most famous being "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Devil and Tom Walker," that he most strongly influenced American writing. He was born April 13, 1783, to William and Sarah Irving, prosperous New York City merchants. He had a relatively basic education, but he loved to read and write. When he was 19 years old, Irving began writing under the name of Jonathan Oldstyle for a newspaper owned by his brother. The young writer loved to travel, and in 1815 he moved to England to work in his family's export business. When the company failed, he began to write fulltime. The result of this decision was a compilation of impressions, thoughts, and descriptions of his travels entitled The Sketch Book, which he published under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon. Of the 32 stories in the collection, twenty are about life in England, and four are about America. From this collection came two of Irving's most popular tales,

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"Rip Van Winkle" and "A Legend of Sleepy Hollow," both of which became immediate classics. Irving believed that in order for an American writer to become successful, he or she had to imitate the literature of the British. In The Sketch Book and other stories, Irving successfully mixed logic and sentiment along with elements of the natural and supernatural worlds. The book was a great success in both Great Britain and the United States, and the resulting profits enabled Irving to devote himself whole-heartedly to writing. Irving remained abroad for more than a decade after this initial publishing success. While in Germany, he became enthralled with the country's rich folklore. Spurred by the copious notes he took after long conversations with the people there, he wrote Tales of a Traveller, a book that attempted to gather together various elements of German folk tales. Today, the work is not known as one of Irving's strongest, but it does contain one of his most famous stories, The Devil and Tom Walker. In 1826, Irving traveled to Spain where he spent several years. He studied Spanish and became fluent in the language. In 1828, his Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus was published, a work of nonfiction in which Irving discusses with particular interest Columbus's conquest of the island of Granada. The following year, Irving was appointed secretary to the American embassy in London. During this time, Irving was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Oxford University in England, proof that he had attained an exalted status within the British literary community. In 1832, he returned to the United States and travelled as far as Oklahoma, writing about it for people back East. At that time, the West was still undeveloped and Irving's account of the area in A Tour on the Prairies was the first glimpse of the American wilderness that many people had. In 1836, Irving settled on a small estate he named "Sunnyside" in Tarrytown, New York, close to the village of Sleepy Hollow he had written about in The Sketch Book. For over twenty years he lived there with his extended family while concentrating on his writing, which included a biography of British writer Oliver Goldsmith and a five-volume set on the life of George Washington. On November 28, 1859, shortly after completing his biography of Washington, Irving died and was buried nearby.

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Plot Summary In "The Devil and Tom Walker," set in New England in the early 1700s, a narrator relates a story he has heard about a local man's dealings with the devil. The narrator never claims that the stories are true, only that they are widely believed. According to local legend, a treasure is buried in a dark grove on an inlet outside of Boston. It is said that Kidd the Pirate left it there under a gigantic tree and that the devil himself "presided at the hiding of the money, and took it under his guardianship. '' Since the pirate Kidd was hanged, no one has disturbed the treasure or challenged the devil's right to it. In the year 1727 a local man, the notorious miser Tom Walker, finds himself in the dark grove alone at dusk while taking a short cut back to his house. Tom is well known among the townspeople for his pitiful horse, his loud wife, and the couple's miserly habits in which they "conspired to cheat each other." Unaware that treasure lay nearby, Tom stops to rest against a tree outside the remains of an Indian fort. Despite local legends of the evil goingson at the site, Tom ' 'was not a man to be troubled with any fears of the kind.'' After absentmindedly digging up an old skull, Tom is suddenly reprimanded by a gruff voice. The voice belongs to a man who is blackened by soot and grime and who introduces himself as the black woodman. Soon enough, Tom realizes that he is in the company of the devil himself. After a brief conversation, "Old Scratch," as Tom calls him, offers Tom the treasure in exchange for a few conditions. He declines. Back home, he tells his wife what transpired in the woods, and she is outraged that he passed up the opportunity for them to gain great wealth in exchange for his soul. She takes it upon herself to seek out the devil and strike a bargain on her own. After several trips to the fort in the woods, she becomes frustrated by the devil's unwillingness to appear to her. One day, she gathers the couple's few possessions of value in her apron and heads off for the woods. She never returns. Eventually, Tom wanders to the woods to find out what happened to her and discovers her apron hanging from a tree. It contains her heart and liver. Hoof-prints and clumps of hair at the base of the tree hint at a fierce struggle. "Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!" he remarks. Neverthe-

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less, the next time the devil appears to Tom, he is eager to strike a deal now that he will not have to share anything with his wife. Balking at the devil's suggestion of becoming a slave-trader, Tom decides that he will become a usurer, or a moneylender, since gaining the treasure is contingent upon being employed in the devil's service. Tom immediately sets up shop in a "counting house" in Boston and attains great wealth by cheating people out of their money and charging them outrageous interest. He builds a luxurious house but refuses to spend money to furnish it properly. He buys an expensive carriage but fails to maintain it, and his horses he only begrudgingly feeds. When Tom grows old, he begins to worry about the terms of his deal with the devil and suddenly becomes a "violent church-goer" in an effort to cheat the devil out of receiving his soul. He reads the bible obsessively and prays loudly and long in church each week. Among the townspeople, "Tom's zeal became as notorious as his riches." Nevertheless, one morning the devil conies calling and instantly whisks Tom away on a black horse in the midst of a thunderstorm to the Indian fort in the woods, never to be seen again. Town officials charged with settling Tom's estate discover his

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bonds and money reduced to cinders, and soon enough his house burns to the ground as well.

Characters The Devil See Old Scratch

Old Scratch Old Scratch is the guise for the Devil, who appears in ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker'' as a darkskinned man. Readers are told, however, that he is neither Indian (Native American) nor white. He has deep red eyes, wears a red sash, and carries his axe on his shoulder. He is the one who tempts Tom Walker with the proposition of wealth and who ultimately condemns him to ride a horse through the swamp where they made their bargain. The Devil's actions are similar to those he exhibits in other stories in which he is a featured character. In the Faust legend, as retold by Johann Goethe from German folklore, the Devil also strikes a deal with a man who desires wealth. It is the Devil's usual place in literature to tempt other characters, often by providing some hapless character a deal' 'too good to refuse." In "The Devil and Daniel Webster," written by Stephen Vincent Benet almost a century after Irving's story, a farmer who is down on his luck sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for seven years' prosperity. In Benet's tale, the Devil is also known as Scratch. In "Tom Walker," Old Scratch personifies temptation, which has existed ostensibly since the Garden of Eden, providing a colorful and dramatic way to present a character's conflict between choosing good and evil.

Tom Walker Tom Walker is considered one of Washington Irving's least likeable characters. As described by Geoffrey Crayon, he is eccentric and miserly. The only thing that initially prevents him from striking a deal with Old Scratch (also known as the Devil) is his loathing for his wife. Walker states that he might have felt compelled to sell his soul to the Devil if it would not have pleased his wife so much. After confiding to his wife that Old Scratch would help him become rich beyond his wildest dreams, he decides against this partnership because Old Scratch

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wanted Tom to become a slave-trader. After his wife disappears and he finds her liver and heart wrapped up in her apron, Tom gives in to Old Scratch and accepts a job not as a slave-trader, but as a usurer, someone who lends money at outrageous interest rates. He becomes quite successful. He is still blunt, brusque, and unforgiving. His newfound wealth has not changed his basic attitudes, he still treats everyone with disrespect. When Old Scratch approaches Walker to collect on his own promise, Walker realizes that he must pay up and be responsible for his own promissory note. Only then does Walker become pious and churchgoing to prove to the Devil that he has seen the light. Unfortunately, his religious conversion has not helped him one bit because he is critical of everyone in the church, quick to judge them, and refuses to see the error of his ways. But Walker has achieved his wealth through greed, and as a result he becomes a prisoner of his own doing. Tom Walker is considered the ' 'New England Faust" by some critics, a reference to the tale of soul-selling Faust by the German writer Johann Goethe. The primary difference between the two tales, however, was that Walker craved only money, whereas Faust craved a number of things, including love. At the time Irving wrote the story he was living in Germany and had become enthralled with folktales of the region, particularly with the Faust legend. Some critics have suggested that if "The Devil and Tom Walker'' is interpreted as an allegory, then the character of Tom Walker represents the evolving business ethic of the young, industrial United States.

Tom's Wife Tom's wife is a tall "termagant" woman, one who is fierce of temper, loud of tongue and strong of arm. She is as equally miserly as her husband, and they both plan ways to cheat each other. She has a minor role in the story, but her death sets the action in motion. When she finds out that her husband has declined the offer from Old Scratch, she takes it upon herself to go into the forest and bargain on her own behalf. The only time Tom ever confides in his wife is when he tells her of the deal set forth by Old Scratch and how he turned it down. Her greedy side overcomes her and they quarrel constantly about it. But, "the more she talked, the more resolute was Tom not to be damned to please her." She ventures out to the swamp to bargain with Old Scratch and

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when she doesn't return, Tom goes in search of her. When he finds her heart and liver wrapped up in her apron, he suddenly feels liberated and immediately goes off to bargain with the Devil. Her greedy ways helped aid Tom in his decision to go back and visit Old Scratch; however, this time he is going of his own free will. In a way, Mrs. Walker helped him to keep his distance from the Devil because of her constant nagging and his need to go against her wishes.

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Topics for Further Study Discuss the relationship between Tom Walker and his wife. Do you feel that they deserve each other? Do you feel that they both get what they deserve? It has been said that Tom Walker is a New England version of Faust legend. Research the different versions of Faust and see whether or not the character of Tom Walker resembles Faust.

Themes Greed Greed is one of the most important themes of ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker'' Tom is approached by Old Scratch and offered wealth beyond his wildest dreams. Initially, Tom is so greedy that he declines because he would have to share the fortune with his wife. Eventually, however, Tom is duped by the false kindness of Old Scratch and blinded by his own greed. As Irving writes, Tom "was not a man to stick at trifles when money was in view." Once established as a moneylender in Boston, Tom is described ironically as a "universal friend of the needy," even though "In proportion to the distress of the applicant was the hardness of his terms." Though he becomes wealthy, Tom still remains parsimonious: he refuses to furnish his mansion or feed his horses properly. Still, he denies his greed. When accused by a customer of taking advantage of his misfortune, Tom answers ' The devil take me if I have made a farthing!" Of course, immediately Old Scratch appears at the door. Irving's moral is clear:' 'Such was the end of Tom Walker and his illgotten wealth. Let all griping money-brokers lay this story to heart."

Hypocrisy Hypocrisy is evident throughout "The Devil and Tom Walker." When agreeing to the terms of the deal, Tom refuses to become a slave-trade because he claims to have a conscience. Yet has no problem becoming a moneylender who will profit by impoverishing others through unscrupulous business practices. In a further example of hypocrisy, Tom insists on keeping his deals with customers, which drive them to ruin, but then he conspires to cheat the devil on the terms of their own deal. Thus,

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his public display of religious fervor has nothing to do with his belief in God but is rather an attempt to save himself from hell. In his final moment of hypocrisy, Tom denies that he has made a penny from an ' 'unlucky land-speculator for whom he had professed the greatest friendship." When the devil comes knocking, Irving makes it clear that Tom's hypocrisy has caught up with him.

Moral Corruption Though Tom Walker is presented as an individual who has always been morally corrupt, the action of "The Devil and Tom Walker" presents how moral corruption breeds more moral corruption, escalating to the greatest corruption of all, a pact with the devil. Described at the beginning of the story as a "meagre, miserly fellow," Tom's ' 'house and its inmates had altogether a bad name." For one with few morals, becoming a corrupt moneylender presents no crises of character. In acquiring great wealth, Tom feels that the ends justify the means. Selling his soul to the devil presents a crisis to Tom only when he pauses to consider the afterlife. His conversion to religion, made specifically for the sake of his own personal interest rather than his faith in God, is a further act of moral corruption. Nevertheless, Tom cannot escape his fate, and Irving makes it clear the consequences of such "illgotten wealth." Though the narrator refers to the

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tale as a "story," he also states that "the truth of it is not to be doubted."

Style Point of View This story is narrated by Geoffrey Crayon, a fictional character created by Irving who appears in a number of the author's works. The story's status of' 'legend'' or ' 'tall tale'' is enhanced by Crayon's comments and the fact that he places the year it takes place, 1727, nearly a hundred years before the date he is writing Tales of a Traveller. Crayon refers to the rumors of treasure near Boston as "old stories" and states that the fate of Tom's wife "is one of those facts which have become confounded by a variety of historians." Through this secondhand narration, Irving shows that the tale has a long, local history, a primary characteristic of a folktale. Furthermore, the narrator states that' 'the story has resolved itself into a proverb, and is the origin of that popular saying, so prevalent in New England, of 'The Devil and Tom Walker.'" Such firstperson narration adds to the feeling the reader has of being told a story in the oral tradition, the way most folktales are handed down from generation to generation.

Allegory Many folktales are allegories. In an allegory, characters and actions are symbolic of larger conditions of human nature. In "The Devil and Tom Walker," the character of Old Scratch personifies evil or temptation. The murky woods full of quagmires in which Tom meets the devil are symbolic of his conscience, which, clouded by his greed, falls easily to the devil's temptation. Tom Walker, an unscrupulous moneylender, makes a pact with the devil and only later professes religious beliefs. Through these actions, Tom represents religious hypocrisy, which Irving shows will be punished.

Setting Irving sought to spearhead the establishment of literature that was uniquely American. To that end, he set "The Devil and Tom Walker" in the New England area near Boston. In the early eighteenth century, this was one of the largest and mostestablished metropolitan areas in the growing United States. Irving describes the landscape of bluffs and swamps that were familiar to the area's inhabi-

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tants and made the site of Tom's meeting with the devil an old Indian fort that had been a stronghold during a war with the Europeans, providing a further uniquely American context. Furthermore, the New England setting highlights Irving's interest in Tom's morality. The region was populated by Puritans, Quakers, and Anabaptists, all strict Christian orders that were highly concerned with church members' moral consciousness. The murky morass in which Tom meets Old Scratch is also symbolic of Tom's character. Through this setting, Irving suggests that if one's heart is full of mud and quicksand, one is likely to encounter and succumb to temptation.

Historical Context A Young America At the time Irving wrote "The Devil and Tom Walker" in 1824, the United States was a new and growing country. As the land was populated by various groups of European immigrants, a uniquely American culture slowly formed as the traditions of many different groups merged and new traditions, brought on by circumstances, emerged. In literature, writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Ralph Waldo Emerson published works that embodied the concepts of freedom, religious piety, and independence that characterized the country. By 1800, New York City was the largest city in the United States, but most of the West remained wild and unexplored. In 1826 the American Temperance Society was founded, giving a voice to those who were intolerant of alcohol consumption of any sort. In 1828, Andrew Jackson, a man known for his efforts to displace many Native American tribes, causing their widespread starvation and death, was elected president. New arrivals to the country, however, were uplifted by America's perceived spirit of Romanticism and humanitarianism. Irving embraced this feeling of Romanticism in his fiction, writing long descriptive passages about landscapes and relating the stories of hardworking immigrants who carved out a good living for their families. In the North, these ideas came to include the belief that slavery was immoral, and tension between the North and South over this and other issues began to rise. Much of the literature of this period, like the novels by James Fenimore Cooper, were romantic tales of the adventures of common men, often concluding with strong morals outlining Puritan ideals of good and evil. "The Devil and Tom Walker," in which

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Contrast 1727: Religion is central to the lives of New England citizens. At the Salem Witch Trials, less than forty years before, twenty people accused of consorting with the devil are executed. In the Puritan tradition, the concepts of sin and penance guide many behaviors. These beliefs regarding good and evil form the basis of many communities' laws. 1824: Religion continues to dominate daily life, though the Puritan tradition has lost much influence as less strict forms of Christianity, like Unitarianism, gain membership. Popularized by poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarianism espouses a blend of philosophy, spirituality, and practicality. The church is based in the town of Concord, Massachusetts.

Tom Walker, a corrupt individual who gets his comeuppance at the hands of the devil, typifies literature of this era.

Critical Overview Though the "The Devil and Tom Walker" has become one of Irving's most famous stories, it received a lackluster response when it was published in Tales of a Traveller in 1824. Barrel Abel remarks in American Literature: Colonial and Early National Writing that this collection of Irving's stories was "one of his poorest... . a batch of hackwork pieced together" in an attempt to use "the German materials he had been accumulating." One of the original reviews, quotes Abel, attacked Irving personally, calling him "indisputably feeble, unoriginal and timorous." Irving was hurt by these accusations, particularly because they came from British writers, for whom he had great esteem and whose style he had tried to emulate. In retrospect, Eugene Current-Garcia says in Studies in Short Fiction that the story "foreshadows the best of

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Today: A majority of people living in the United States belong to a house of worship. Though Christianity claims the largest number of followers, millions of Americans are Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist. 1780s: Wolfgang Mozart writes Don Giovanni, an opera about a promiscuous man who is confronted by the devil. 1832: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes his tale of temptation and the devil, Faust. Today: The devil continues to be a popular character in literature, appearing recently in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and John Updike's The Witches ofEastwick.

Hawthorne's fictional exposure of Yankee shrewdness and Puritan hypocrisy." Current-Garcia also credits Irving for helping to develop the genre of the short story: "If he did not actually invent the short story, he had indeed set the pattern for the artistic recreation of common experience in short fictional form." By the mid-twentieth century, with the critics' adverse reaction to Tales of a Travellerlong faded, opinion had solidly changed in Irving's favor. William Hedges wrote in Washington Irving: An American Study 1802-1832 that "The Devil and Tom Walker" is one of Irving's best works.

Criticism Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton Elisabeth Piedmont-Morton is an educator and the coordinator of the undergraduate writing center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she discusses the conventions of the narrative sketch as practiced by Washington Irving in ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker.''

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What Do I Read Next? A History of New York, Irving's 1809 novel in which Dutchman Diedrich Knickerbocker recounts the settling of New York by the Dutch, in a comic and highly inaccurate manner. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, is comprised of 32 short stories, many of which deal with England. The collection includes two of Irving's most celebrated works: "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Moby Dick, Herman Melville's 1851 epic of the seafaring Captain Ahab's quest to conquer the great white whale, Moby Dick. So single-minded is Ahab's goal that he fails to realize that he is being ruined by greed and deceit. The Pardoner's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer's tale that explores ' 'the curse of avarice and cupidity." Three bandits attempt to become wealthy through deceitful means, but each of them attempts to usurp the others' gold. In the final analysis, all three are destroyed by their own

"The Devil and Tom Walker" was published in 1824 in Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveller. It is widely recognized as the best story in the book and the third best of all his tales (after ' 'Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.") Having established an international literary reputation, Irving had committed himself to a career as a professional man of letters, and the mixed critical reception that Tales of a Traveller received stung him badly. Modern readers of stories in this volume are often struck by the folk or fairy-tale quality of the narratives and by Irving's evocation of an older American landscape rich in symbolic texture. Irving's career and work is best understood in the context of the enormous cultural and ideological changes transforming the new nation at the time. By the 1820s, the United States had concluded its second war with Britain, Lewis and Clark had already explored the West, and the population grew

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greed. This story is the basis for the movie, Treasure of the Sierra Madre. ' 'Young Goodman Brown'' by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1835. An allegorical tale of a pious Puritan New England man who encounters his fellow townspeople engaged in the black mass. Hawthorne was a contemporary of Irving's, and both writers were concerned with creating an American literature that featured the tenets of New England Puritanism. ' "The Devil and Daniel Webster'' a short story by Steven Vincent Benet first published in 1937. A New England folktale that won an O. Henry Memorial Award, the story concerns a poor farmer strikes a deal with the devil, who appears as a lawyer. In an attempt to back out of the deal after obtaining prosperity, the farmer hires Daniel Webster to defend him in a court trial presided over by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

from a little over five million to nine-and-a-half million in the years 1800-1820. Still, 97 percent of Americans lived in rural communities. The country was poised for great change: By 1850 the population reached 21 million and the proportion of urban dwellers increased sharply. During these turbulent years, inventions that spurred industrial growth, like the steamboat, the cotton gin, the telegraph, and eventually the railroad, dramatically shaped Americans' sense of themselves. Irving was not an unqualified believer in the popular notions of progress and expansion. He consciously chose British literary models and spent most of his life living outside of the United States because he believed that the only hope for American culture was to attach itself to the traditions of Britain. Tales of a Traveller was written and published in England, where Irving enjoyed a large audience and had cultivated a reputation for charm

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and civility. His literary depictions of the New World tend to find value in times past when American culture was more closely tied to the values of the Old World. One of the reasons that Irving had such a large readership was that his writing harkened back to an older time, before materialism and commercialism became leading forces in the newly emerging American society. Nevertheless, as many readers of "The Devil and Tom Walker" are well aware, Irving's fictional America is hardly a new Eden, unspoiled and uncorrupt. Rather, the fictional landscape of the "The Devil and Tom Walker" seems haunted by events of the past and infused by Irving's occasionally biting satire. ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker'' is written in the genre that Irving practically invented—the fictional sketch. One of his innovations was the fictional narrator, in this case Geoffrey Crayon, who views events and reports local legends with good-natured skepticism. The device of the narrator serves several purposes for Irving. First, it allows him to distance himself from his readers. Many critics suggest that he started to rely on this mechanism when he sensed that his reading public was dwindling. Second, the intervention of Crayon permits Irving to tell fantastic stories without having to attest to their truth. According to Donald Ringe in his essay "Irving's Use of the Gothic Mode," this device allowed Irving, a man who subscribed to the dominant realistic philosophies of the day, to present "ghosts and goblins as actual beings" without having to explain them as natural phenomena. As readers, by extension, we do not have to believe that Tom Walker actually consorted with the devil, only that the legend says he did. Irving's use of these gothic themes within the framework of the fictional sketch raises another issue, however. Irving's satirical purposes makes less important the question whether the devil, the pirate Kidd, or the treasure are real. In an allegory like "The Devil and Tom Walker" the fantastic elements are "real" in the sense that they represent something else. The comedy of satire works because of the different ways readers can interpret the story. For example, Irving and his ideal readers— those in on the joke—get to poke fun at the fictional audience for this story, those who actually believe that Tom Walker met the devil in the woods, made a deal with him, and later was carried off to his fate in a carriage driven by black horses. The narrator is a kind of intermediary between audiences, sometimes gullible ("Such, according to this most authentic old story, was all that was to be found of Tom's

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The fictional landscape of the 'The Devil and Tom Walker1 seems haunted by events of the past and infused by Irving's occasionally biting satire."

wife") and sometimes judgmental ("Like most short cuts, it was an ill-chosen route"). By setting the story in New England, Irving is invoking the young country's colonial past. The description of the dark forest with its dark history of an Indian massacre hardly portrays a people proudly connected to their own noble heritage. Instead, Irving seems to suggest that this is a community content to bury and forget old atrocities, and, more broadly, that the nation eager to bury its own history is doomed to be haunted by it. The woods in this tale also invoke the Puritan's sense that the wilderness is the habitat of all sorts of evil. Readers will recognize the similarity to the dark wood of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," for example. Tom's short cut is, of course, a quicker route through the woods, but it also represents what Irving sees as the American tendency toward quick fixes and quick profits. Irving's allegory in "The Devil and Tom Walker" is very broadly drawn. In fact, many readers agree with Mary Weatherspoon Bowden in her book Washington Irving when she says that' 'occasionally [his] allegory gets in the way of the story." The example that Bowden points out is that neither the pirate Kidd nor the treasure, not having any allegorical work to do, ever reappear after the first paragraph. After the pirate and the treasure are dispensed with, however, what remains is a stinging indictment of what Irving believes to be the state of economics and politics in the United States. Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Charles G. Zug III In the following essay, Zug talks about the aspects of common folklore that Irving incorporat-

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ed into ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker,'' particularly those he gathered in his travels to Germany. Although it is unquestionably one of Washington Irving's finest tales, "The Devil and Tom Walker" has never attracted much critical attention. First published in 1824 in Part IV of Tales of a Traveller, the tale recounts the fate of an avaricious New Englander, who sells his soul to the Devil in return for Captain Kidd's treasure, and is finally carted off to Hell after a long and profitable career as a usurer in colonial Boston. For the most part, critics have been content to note that the tale is "a sort of comic New England Faust,'' or that i t ' 'is redolent of the American soil." In other words, the consensus is that the tale has certain Germanic overtones but is indigenous to the young American republic in which Irving grew up. No one, however, has really attempted to examine the possible sources for this work or note the complex manner in which Irving has interwoven numerous motifs from American and German folklore.... At the outset, it is significant that no source has ever been discovered for "The Devil and Tom Walker." Most commonly, critics cite the Faust theme as the basis for the tale, but this is rather inaccurate, for Tom Walker is in no sense a scholar who desires to extend the limits of human knowledge. In actuality, it is not the Faust theme but the well-known motif M211, Man sells soul to devil, that lies at the heart of the tale. This, however, is only one of numerous folk motifs used, and taken by itself, it provides little insight into the source or structure of the tale. The problem here is that unlike "Rip Van Winkle," which is largely patterned on a complete tale, "The Devil and Tom Walker" is based on a series of folk motifs gathered by Irving from a wide variety of sources. It is important at this point to understand the exact distinction between a tale and a motif. The former is a complete and independent narrative which consists of one or more motifs traditionally associated with each other, while the latter is ' 'the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition." Generally, motifs fall into one of three categories: "the actors in a tale," "items in the background of the action," and most commonly, "single incidents." Although based on folklore like "Rip Van Winkle," "The Devil and Tom Walker" is thus a much more complex and original work, for instead of starting with a fully developed plot, Irving began with a series of plot elements and fused them into a new and harmonious whole. That he was highly skilled in assembling

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these traditional motifs is evidenced by the number of critics who have accepted "The Devil and Tom Walker'' as a rewritten version of a folktale that he had heard or read. To fully understand Irving's increasingly sophisticated use of folklore, it is necessary to briefly consider some of Irving's activities between the publication of The Sketchbook in 1819 and the writing of "The Devil and Tom Walker" in 1824. The key event here appears to have been the yearlong tour through Germany in 1822 and 1823. Prior to this journey, Irving had shown an increasing interest in German lore and literature, and had been encouraged by Sir Walter Scott' 'to study the fascinating history of folklore." However, Irving's contact with German folklore at this time was limited to the few works over which he struggled to learn the German language and a number of English publications which were ' Translated or adapted from the popular literature of Germany." The trip to Germany in 1822 gave Irving a new opportunity: a chance to investigate and gather up German folklore at first-hand. As he wrote to Thomas Storrow at the beginning of the tour, "I mean to get into the confidence of every old woman I meet with in Germany and get from her, her wonderful budget of stories." In other words, Irving was out to collect folklore in its purest state, directly from oral transmission. Stanley Williams notes this shift in Irving's attitude, commenting that' 'he now formed a resolution that folklore should not merely entertain the knight-errant but should earn his lordship's bread and butter. He would really follow that impulse felt at Abbotsford in 1817 and create his volume of German legends. The tour now became a hunt for gnomes, pixies, and phantom armies; and he extended the journal into a saving bank for this species of coin." That the hunt was clearly successful is revealed by the numerous legends and scraps of lore that may be found in the letters and journals written during the German tour. At Salzburg, for example, Irving noted that ' 'the mountain regions are full of fable and elfin story, and I had some wonderful tales told me." In his journal, he even wrote out seven local legends from this region, all of them concerned with the imposing figure of Untersberg Mountain. Walter Reichart points out that none of these legends appears to have a literary source, "so that it seems likely that Irving actually heard them from some of the inhabitants." Since Irving had little time or ability for reading German during his travels, this conclusion is almost inescapable. In addition, the letters and journals abound

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with fragments of and brief references to wellknown tales and motifs, such as ' 'the Emperor and his army shut up in the enchanted mountain'' and "the Black Huntsman and the enchanted Bullets." Altogether, it appears that Irving rapidly enlarged his working knowledge of German folklore, and there are numerous entries indicating that he also enjoyed retelling the tales to his friends. The German experience thus served not only to increase his "savings bank" of potential source materials, but more important, to teach him the technique of combining and recombining these materials so as to form new tales. It is exactly this shift in emphasis, from written to oral sources, from the tale to the motif, and from the mere materials to the actual mechanics of folklore, that is reflected in "The Devil and Tom Walker." As such, this tale suggests that a re-evaluation of Irving's later use of folklore is very much needed. As the following analysis reveals, Irving's use of folklore after his German tour was somewhat less ' 'slavish'' than most critics have been willing to admit.. . . In conjunction with the prevalence of German motifs, it is important to note that practically the entire plot is made up of elements from folklore. In fact the only nontraditional portions of the plot are the two sections which I have labeled the domestic and financial subplots. The tale opens with three American motifs built around the legend of Captain Kidd. Immediately following is the domestic subplot, which is reminiscent of the marital situation in "Rip Van Winkle" and serves to develop the mutual enmity between Tom and his wife. Merely to infuriate her, Tom obstinately refuses to close his pact with the Devil. She, therefore, runs off with the family silverware to make her own bargain, and is apparently carried off by the Devil after an heroic struggle. After this humorous interlude, Irving immediately returns to the main plot of folk motifs, and it is not until after the pact is actually completed that he inserts the financial subplot. This section describes the state of affairs in colonial Boston, neatly delineating the avarice and religious hypocrisy of the inhabitants. With the uttering of the oath, Irving again returns to the main plot, and the tale moves swiftly to a close. Taken as a whole, the plot thus consists of a central chain of folk motifs into which two realistic subplots have been inserted. . .. Irving's choice of the Kidd legends as a framework for ' The Devil and Tom Walker'' was a good one, for it placed the tale in a distinctly American setting. Willard Hallam Bonner, who has made an extensive study of Kidd, notes that' 'the composite

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Irving certainly never intended 'The Devil and Tom Yfalker' to be taken as a folktale. His purpose was to produce an entertaining, fast-moving story based largely on German folk motifs and firmly rooted in an American locale."

legend surrounding him is Saxon North America's first full-bodied legend." However, this legend is a limited one, in that it generally contains only a few, often recurring motifs. There is first a widespread belief that Kidd did bury his treasure, either along the southern New England coast or up the Hudson River. In addition, there is the belief that the treasure is guarded either by a slain sailor or worse, by ' 'the Earl of Hell himself, at whose command Kidd 'buried his Bible in the sand.'" As noted in the earlier plot outline, Irving used these American motifs at the beginning of the tale, although he shifted the place of burial to the Boston region. With the introduction of the domestic subplot, which follows immediately, Irving moved away from the Kidd legends and began using German motifs which concerned the Devil. Apparently it was the Kidd stories heard from Colonel Aspinwall that gave Irving the initial inspiration and got the tale underway. Once started, Irving inserted the two realistic subplots and used the figure of the Devil, first mentioned in the American legend, as the means of transition to the numerous German materials.... Irving certainly never intended ' "The Devil and Tom Walker'' to be taken as a folktale. His purpose was to produce an entertaining, fast-moving story based largely on German folk motifs and firmly rooted in an American locale. In this he was eminently successful, and ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker" deserves to be ranked with "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as one of his best tales. Stanley Williams has pointed out that the major flaw in Tales of a Traveller was Irving's failure ' 'to draw bravely from that wonderful stock

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of German legend in his notebooks and in his mind." While this analysis is true for most of these tales, it is clearly not applicable to "The Devil and Tom Walker," where the carefully assembled chain of German motifs provides the backbone for a unique and vigorous plot structure. Still a second valid criticism of the Tales of a Traveller is that Irving did not succeed "in transplanting German legends into American settings where the native landscape could reflect the spirit of the tale." Once again, "The Devil and Tom Walker" proves the exception, for Irving skillfully introduced the German materials through the use of the native Kidd legends, using the figure of the Devil as the unifying force for all of the motifs. By adding the two realistic subplots, a few brief character sketches, and some local history and legend, Irving succeeded in developing a truly American atmosphere. As William L. Hedge has observed, Irving was able ' 'to bring certain aspects of Puritanism into dramatic focus by connecting Yankee shrewdness and Puritan respectability." As previously noted, this satire on the avarice and hypocrisy of colonial Boston is skillfully integrated with the folklore Irving used, and the final motif, Devil's money becomes ashes, is so well chosen that it serves as a fitting epilogue to the tale. Once the construction of ' "The Devil and Tom Walker'' is laid bare, it becomes evident that Irving, at least after his German tour, was no "slavish" imitator but rather a highly skilled manipulator of both American and German folklore. In avoiding the stock Gothic machinery and a distant, foreign setting for an American locale, and in assembling a chain of folk motifs that was distinctly his own invention, he created a vigorous tale that is still very much alive and meaningful today. This is not to assert that Irving possessed a first-rank imagination, as his successors Poe and Hawthorne did. Instead, as his contemporary Coleridge might have observed, Irving was endowed with a mechanical rather than an organic imagination. In this sense, he is not unlike the medieval French author Chretien de Troyes, who drew so heavily on traditional materials yet left his own stamp on them. Like Chretien, Irving knew and understood the traditional storyteller's skill in relating folk motifs and so, in tales such as "The Devil and Tom Walker," he was able to recombine and reshape such motifs into new and significant forms. Source: Charles G. Zug III,' The Construction of 'The Devil and Tom Walker': A Study of Irving's Later Use of Folk-

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lore," in New York Folklore Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, December, 1968, pp. 243-60.

James J. Lynch In the following excerpt of a longer article, Lynch talks about the devil as a character in literature, including his appearance in ' 'The Devil and Tom Walker," one the devil's first appearances in American literature. In the spring of 1951, when the emotionalism of the MacArthur controversy was at its highest, a mob of people in one of our western towns hanged Secretary of State Acheson in effigy. If this act had taken place about one hundred seventy years ago, there probably would have been one difference—the figure of the devil would also have had a part in the ceremony. We learn from contemporary accounts of the Revolution that when Benedict Arnold's treason became known his effigy was burned and hanged throughout the towns of America, invariably with an image of the devil thrusting him into hell with a pitchfork. Even as late as 1828, the school board of Lancaster, Ohio, declared the railroad a device of the devil. And when Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker'' appeared, a contemporary critic of 1825 wrote: "If Mr. Irving believes in the existence of Tom Walker's master we can scarcely conceive how he can so earnestly jest about him; at all events, we would counsel him to beware lest his own spells should prove fatal to him." Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe, therefore, being fairly close to the times when the devil had some status, could be expected as romantic writers to use the devil as one of their characters. The devil as a character is, of course, a manifestation of romantic writing concerning the supernatural. It is obvious, however, that he is not to be associated only with the so-called romantic period, for he has appeared throughout our literature from the writings of Cotton Mather to Whittaker Chambers' article on the history of the devil in Life magazine of February 2, 1948.... A biographer of Irving stated that ' "The Devil and Tom Walker'' may possibly be called ' 'a sort of comic New England Faust, for during 1822 and 1823 Irving had read and reread Goethe." Calling him a New England Faust might be a clever way of referring to Irving's devil, but another critic analyzes more accurately when he states that the story ' 'owes very little to foreign influences. Though he is interested in popular legend, and shows sympathy

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with the Romantic movement of Europe, Irving's story is redolent of American soil." Irving's devil is of the pure New England variety—and he could hardly have been thinking of Goethe's regal Mephistopheles when he wrote his story. Irving places his humorous tale in Massachusetts history during the office of Governor Belcher (1730-1741). Tom Walker, at no point a serious figure, finds himself following an ' 'ill chosen route through a swamp thickly grown with the great gloomy pines and hemlocks which made it dark at noonday.'' After setting the atmosphere in much the same way that Hawthorne did later, Irving recounts the legend of the ' 'Old Indian Fort'' of which the common people had a bad opinion ' 'since the Indian wars when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the evil spirit." After this reference to the superstition of the early New England folk, the devil suddenly appears unannounced—a technique used by most devilwriters. Tom had just uncovered a skull when a gruff voice says, "Let that skull alone!" Irving describes the devil in accordance with his common title in New England, "The Black Man." ' 'You are commonly called Old Scratch," Tom remarks calmly enough to the devil. "The same at your service," the devil replies. Irving explains that Tom ' 'had lived so long with a termagant wife, that he did not even fear the devil.'' The outcome of this meeting is that the devil promises Captain Kidd's buried treasure if Tom will sell his soul. Returning to his wife, Tom tells her of the devil's offer. But when she urges him to enter into the contract, he refuses in order to irritate her with his perversity. The wife then sets out to make a deal with "Old Scratch," and Irving comments, "Though a female scold is generally considered a match for the devil, yet in this instance she appears to have had the worst of it." This remark is reminiscent of the imported English ballad ' 'The Farmer's Curst Wife," wherein the wife is taken off to hell by the devil and then brought back to the farmer because she is too unpleasant even for the devil. But Tom's wife is never seen again, and when Tom goes to the swamp, he sees signs of a fierce struggle. "Egad," he says to himself, "Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it!" Feeling gratitude to the devil for carrying off his wife, Tom then decides to do business with him. But the devil is crafty, and after some delay Tom again meets "the black woodsman," who now affects indifference while casually humming a tune.

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Though he is interested in popular legend, and shows sympathy with the Romantic movement of Europe, Irving's story is redolent of American soil."

If one were to imagine an actor taking this devil's part, Charles Laughton might well be an appropriate choice. The contract is eventually made between them. The devil tries to make the condition that Tom enter the slave trade, but Tom refuses, agreeing, however, to open a usury business in Boston. There are two explanations as to why Irving mentioned the slave trade here: that he was repelled by a barbarous practice that the devil fosters with primary interest, and/or that he wanted to achieve suspense by putting into the reader's mind the idea that Tom might escape that fulfillment of the contract because of a momentary humane feeling. Using Kidd's treasure to build up a fortune in making loans and then foreclosing, Tom, as he grows older and more conscious of the terms of the contract, becomes a religious zealot, carrying the Bible at all times in order to ward off the devil. Irving refers to the legend that Tom buried his horse upside down because when the world would be turned upside down on the last day he would be able to give the devil a run for it. But according to Irving, if he did this, it was of no help to him, ' 'at least so says the authentic old legend." Tom is caught off guard without his Bible while he is foreclosing a mortgage, and is seized during a storm and carried off in the direction of the swamp and the Old Indian Fort, never to be seen again. Irving concludes the legendary story: Let all griping money-brokers lay this story to heart. The truth of it is not to be doubted. The very hole under the oak trees, whence he dug Kidd's money, is to be seen to this day; and the neighboring swamp and old Indian fort are often haunted nights by a figure on horseback, in morning-gown and white cap, which is doubtless the troubled spirit of the usurer. In fact, the story has resolved itself into a proverb, and is the

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origin of the popular saying, so prevalent throughout New England, of "The Devil and Tom Walker."

Hedges, William L. Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802-1832, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965, 231-233.

Irving would be interested to know that the popular saying to which he refers continued to be used until the twentieth century....

Ringe, Donald A. "Irving's Use of the Gothic Mode," in Critical Essays on Washington Irving, edited by Donald A. Ringe, G. K. Hall, 1990, pp. 202-17.

Source: James J. Lynch, "The Devil in the Writings of Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe," in the New York Folklore Quarterly, Volume VIII, No. 1, Spring, 1952, pp. 111-31.

Further Reading Sources Abel, Darrel.' The Rise of a National Literature,'' American Literature: Colonial and Early National Writing. New York: Barren's Educational Series, 1963, pp. 268-340. Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon. Washington Irving, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. Current-Garcia, Eugene. ' 'Irving Sets the Pattern: Notes on Professionalism and the Art of the Short Story," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. X, No. 4, Fall, 1973, pp. 327-41.

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Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey. "Washington Irving and the Genesis of the Fictional Sketch," in Critical Essays on Washington Irving, edited by Ralph M. Aderman, G. K. Hall, 1990, pp. 217-35. Demonstrates Irving's pioneering work in developing the sketch genre of literary writing. Woodress, James.' 'Washington Irving,'' in Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994, pp. 262-65. A biographical and bibliographical sketch on Washington Irving.

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The Eatonville Anthology First published in the fall of 1926 in the Messenger magazine, "The Eatonville Anthology" is one of Zora Neale Hurston's most important and interesting short stories because of its design, content, and use of authentic dialect. Hurston's collection of vignettes in "The Eatonville Anthology" do not conform to the narrative pattern that most readers expect from a work of short fiction. Hurston's story is a collection of short profiles and anecdotes about a cast of characters who inhabit a small African-American community in central Florida during the early decades of the twentieth century. Together these individual voices are a powerful portrayal of black culture at a time when blacks were largely subsumed by the dominant white culture.

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When "The Eatonville Anthology" was published, its design would have been familiar to readers of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), which was the first of its kind in American literature. Masters' Anthology is a collection of poetic monologues, or epigrams, by former inhabitants of an area in central Illinois. Hurston makes a direct literary allusion to Masters' work with her use of the word "anthology" in the title of her narrative and by composing the chapters of brief, dialectfilled stories about residents of a small Florida town that exists on the outskirts of Orlando. Hurston's "Anthology" is recognized as an important early twentieth-century work for its blend of authentic folklore and fiction.

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Author Biography Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1903 in Eatonville, Florida, according to some sources. Others place her birth as early as January 7, 1891, but her headstone reads 1901-1960. She was the seventh of eight children born to John Hurston, a Baptist preacher, carpenter, and town mayor, and his wife, Lucy, a former schoolteacher. To the young Hurston, rural Eatonville was ' 'a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty of guavas, two schools and no jailhouse." It also was an area rich in the black folk traditions and history that permeates Hurston's literature. Hurston left her job as a wardrobe girl in Florida for a job as an actress in a traveling lightopera troupe. Eventually she found herself in Baltimore, Maryland. Determined to complete her education, she attended Morgan Academy in 1917 and 1918, and then went on to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where her first story was published in the campus literary magazine in 1921. Hurston continued to write and publish while she studied anthropology at Barnard College in New York City from 1925 to 1927. She did her field anthropology work with the renowned Dr. Frank Boas at Columbia University in 1926 and returned to Florida in 1927 to collect folklore.' 'The Eatonville Anthology," published in 1926, recorded much of the folklore and tradition that existed in her hometown of Eatonville. The story reflected her interest in anthropology and in preserving bits of the past for future generations. Hurston was briefly married twice. Her first marriage was to fellow anthropology student Herbert Sheen in 1927, and her second marriage was to Albert Prince III in 1939. Both marriages failed because Hurston was more attached to her work and her independence than to either husband. This independence was reflected in the risks that she took as a writer, especially her renowned use of authentic African-American dialect in her fiction and her intent to break' 'that old silly rule about Negroes not writing about white people." In her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Hurston combined her knowledge of "Negro folklore' ' with biblical themes. Next, in Mules and Men, Hurston included many folktales that the tellers call "lies," which contain hidden social and philosophical messages. These messages were an impor-

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tant part of the culture surrounding Hurston's hometown. Critics maintain that Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, is her best work. In addition to these and many other literary and anthropological works, Hurston also worked for a short while on the wholly AfricanAmerican play Mule-Bone with Langston Hughes. Although Hurston was a prolific writer, by the mid-1940s her career had begun to wane. Poverty and ill health plagued Hurston until her death in the St. Lucia County Welfare Home in Florida on January 28, 1960. The burial was delayed ten days while friends raised $600 to pay for a funeral. Thirteen years passed before writer Alice Walker traveled to Florida to put a headstone on Hurston's grave. Walker began a crusade to secure Hurston a place in the annals of literary history. The lightgray marker in the Garden of the Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, reads: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South. Novelist. Folklorist. Anthropologist."

Plot Summary Hurston's "The Eatonville Anthology" is comprised of fourteen short sketches which offer humorous commentary on lives of residents in Eatonville, Florida. Several characters, such as Joe Clarke, owner of the general store and Eatonville's mayor and postmaster, and Elijah Moseley, appear in a number of the segments while many other characters appear only once. In the first segment entitled "The Pleading Woman," Mrs. Tony Roberts begs for food for her family. First she begs for meat from Mr. Clarke who is annoyed, because he knows that her husband is a good provider and she does not need to beg. She then visits various homes until she has collected everything she wants for the day. Apparently, Mrs. Roberts is never satisfied with what she is given. The narrator explains that the next day her begging continues. In "Turpentine Love," Jim Merchant's love for his wife endures, explains the narrator, despite the fact that she has had all her teeth out. When they were courting, the fact that she was "subject to fits... didn't cool his love" either. One Sunday Mrs. Merchant's mother tries to stop one of her daughter's fits by giving her a dose of turpentine

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and accidentally spills some in her eye. Somehow this cures her fits, and she never has another one. In the untitled Segment III, Becky Moore has "eleven children of assorted colors and sizes." The narrator pokes fun at Becky, claiming that the fact that Becky's children are fatherless is completely the men's fault, since she "has never stopped any of the fathers of her children from proposing." Segment IV, "Tippy," focuses on "the most interesting member" of Sykes Jones's family, the dog. Tippy has been sentenced to death several times for a variety of food theft crimes. Despite these threats, he manages to remain skinny, alive, and friendly. In Segment V, "The Way of a Man with a Train," Old Man Anderson lives in the country and has no interest in seeing a train. "Patronage and ridicule" finally force him to drive his horse and wagon into the woods beside the railroad to wait for a train. He secures his horse far from the tracks where it will be safe. When the train finally comes "thundering over the trestle spurting smoke," Old Man Anderson becomes so frightened that he drives away, damaging his wagon extensively. Segment VI is entitled "Coon Taylor." Coon Taylor is said to have never done any real stealing, except for chickens, watermelons, and muskmelons. No one has ever managed to catch Coon stealing, but Joe Clarke decides to try. During the first attempt, Joe falls asleep and Coon ends up inadvertently cracking a melon on Joe's head. However, Clarke later catches Coon thieving during sugar cane season and makes him sit down and eat all the cane he has stolen. Joe also banishes Coon from the town for three months. "Village Fiction," Segment VII, features Joe Lindsay, Lum Boger, and Brazzle, three residents who compete for the title of town liar. A tall tale is recounted in this section, entitled "Exhibit A," and it is unclear who actually tells this lie. The unspecified storyteller claims to have witnessed a doctor cut up a woman in Orlando one day, remove all her organs, wash them, dry them, and put them back. The phrasing of the section makes it difficult to know who is actually telling the lie. Segment VIII is another example of a "village fiction" concerning a character named Sewell. According to Elijah Moseley, Sewell moves so often that every time he enters his backyard, the chickens expect another move and ' 'lie down and cross their legs, ready to be tied up again."

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Segment IX concerns Mrs. Clarke, Joe Clarke's wife. Clarke yells at her and beats her whenever she makes a mistake working in the store. In church on Sunday Mrs. Clarke closes her eyes and' 'shakes the hand of fellowship with everybody in the Church . . . but somehow always misses her husband." Segment X describes the behavior of another woman in church, Mrs. McDuffy. Her husband also beats her at home, because he does not like her shouting in church. Mrs. McDuffy tells Elijah Moseley that she cannot stop shouting, but Mr. McDuffy tells Elijah that she shouts because she knows Mr. McDuffy dislikes it. "Double-Shuffle," Segment XI, concerns the kind of dancing people did in the ' 'good old days'' in Eatonville before World War I and before the age of the fox trot. The grand march of Eatonville, unlike the grand march performed by whites "still has a kick .. . [and is] too much for some of the young folks." Segment XII,' 'The Head of the Nail," features Daisy Taylor, the town vamp. Daisy torments the timid Mrs. Laura Grooms about her alleged affair with Laura's husband. The teasing occurs one Saturday night when the town gathers on the post office

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porch in its customary fashion "to tell stories and treat the ladies." Laura Grooms surprises everyone by beating Daisy with an ax handle because Daisy refuses to stop taunting. The beating is so thorough that Daisy falls into a ditch. Defeated, Daisy leaves Eatonville for Orlando.

involved in many of the affairs of the community. It is revealed later in Section VI that Clarke is also the town mayor, postmaster, and has several other duties. His wife, who refers to him as ''Jody,'' is the main character of Section IX.

"Pants and Cal'line," Segment XIII, is the story of Mitchell Potts who cheats on his wife and buys his mistress shoes. Unlike Laura Grooms, Mitch's wife Cal'line is known to ' 'do anything she had a mind to." This sketch ends inconclusively, with Mitch "smiling sheepishly" as he passes the porch sitters on his way to visit Miss Pheeny, and Cal'line following two minutes behind him, "silently, unsmilingly," carrying an axe.

Mrs. Clarke

The final segment of "The Eatonville Anthology," Segment XIV, recounts a version of the Brer Rabbit tale, when ' 'animals used to talk just like people." In this version of the story, "dogs and rabbits was the best of friends—even tho' both of them was stuck on the same gal which was Miss Nancy Coon." Miss Nancy likes both Mr. Dog and Mr. Rabbit, but she seems to be favoring Mr. Dog who has the sweeter singing voice. Mr. Rabbit cannot sing at all, but promises his friend that he can help him sing even sweeter if Mr. Dog will stick out his tongue. Instead of helping, Mr. Rabbit splits Mr. Dog's tongue with a knife, and "the dog has been mad at the rabbit ever since."

Characters Old Man Anderson Old Man Anderson is a farmer who lives outside the city limits of Eatonville and only comes to the town two or three times a year. He has never seen a train and the townspeople look down on him because he has no interest in seeing the train go through the nearby town of Maitland. Observing the train is a big event for Eatonville residents, and Anderson finally gives in to their ridicule. When he travels into Maitland the sound of the train scares him so badly that he drives his horse and wagon deep into the forest without ever seeing the train at all.

Mr. Clarke Mr. Clarke is one of the shopkeepers in ' "The Eatonville Anthology." He appears in several other sections of the story in addition to his part in Section I. He and his wife own one of the main stores in Eatonville (perhaps the general store) and he is

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Mrs. Clarke helps her husband, Joe Clarke, run their store in Eatonville. Section IX describes her behavior in church every Sunday and her relationship with Mr. Clarke. The narrator describes a fairly volatile relationship with Mr. Clarke reprimanding his wife for her mistakes and sometimes beating her.

Jody See Mr. Clarke

Joe See Mr. Clarke

Sykes Jones Sykes Jones is the owner of a dog named Tippy. Tippy is the main focus of Section IV, rather than Sykes. Tippy has a reputation around Eatonville as a scrounger of food and various residents have tried to get rid of the dog by feeding him strychnine, bluestone, and other poisons. The dog survives however, and remains skinny despite the food he steals.

Joe Lindsay Joe Lindsay is one of the town liars and a subject of Section VII. It is said that he is "the largest manufacturer of prevarications in Eatonville" by another resident, Lum Boger. In other words, he is the biggest liar in town. Another character, Brazzle, regards himself as the biggest liar in town. A description of one of the character's lies is briefly recounted in Section VII. The phrasing of the two short paragraphs in this section, entitled ' 'Exhibit A," makes it unclear who actually tells this lie.

Lizzimore Lizzimore is a blind guitar player who played at the Methodist church during ' 'Double-Shuffles'' in Eatonville in "the good old days before the war." The "Double-Shuffles" are the focus of Section XI. They are dances that were very popular with the townspeople, and are part of the tradition and lore of the town. Attended by the Clarkes, Moseleys, and numerous others, the dances are events remembered by everyone.

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Mrs. McDuffy Mrs. McDuffy is another resident of Eatonville, and her behavior in church is the focus of Section X. The narrator describes her shouting in church and her husband's aversion to such behavior. He beats her at home for her shouting and does not understand her need to yell. Like the relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Clarke, the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. McDuffy includes beatings that seem to be an accepted part of life in Eatonville.

Jim Merchant Jim Merchant and his wife are the subjects of the second section of "Anthology." He is a minor character in relation to the rest of the story. Section II recounts his first meeting with his wife, who has ' 'fits." Her cure is brought about by spilling turpentine into one of her eyes.

Becky Moore Becky Moore is the unwed mother of eleven children who have been sired by a variety of men. Other mothers in Eatonville will not let their kids play with the Moore children. According to the narrator, Becky believes that the fathers of her children are to blame for her unwed status. The other mothers are apparently afraid their children will adopt Becky's beliefs or will become like the missing fathers and not take responsibility for their own offspring.

Media Adaptations Zora Is My Name! is based on the life of Zora Neale Hurston, and stars Ruby Dee and Louis Gossett, Jr. Originally aired as a part of PBS's American Playhouse series, this 90-minute production is available for purchase through PBS Home Video, Karol Video, Facets Multimedia, Inc.

an axe and follows Mitch through the town on his way to Delphine's. This section ends with no resolution to this conflict, and critics maintain that part of this section was lost during publication. However, Cal'line's character and strength are amply developed throughout this section of "Eatonville."

Brer Rabbit See Brother Rabbit

Brother Rabbit

Narrator The narrator of "The Eatonville Anthology" represents the community of Eatonville as a single voice. The special feature of this voice is the way in which it presents each citizen or incident with a tone of approval and acceptance as a separate part of the whole town. None is subjected to negative judgment or criticism. In this way, the character of the community is preserved and reflected positively in the light and role of each of its citizens.

The Pleading Woman See Mrs. Tony Roberts

Brother Rabbit is a character in Section XIV of ' The Eatonville Anthology.'' This final section is a retelling of the Brer Rabbit story and contains other animal characters such as Miss Nancy Coon and Mr. Dog. In this Eatonville version of the story, competition between Mr. Dog and Brother Rabbit to win the favor of Miss Coon results in dogs and rabbits becoming enemies because of the trick Brer Rabbit plays on Mr. Dog. Convinced that the rabbit is going to help him learn how to sing sweetly, Mr. Dog sticks out his tongue to receive a gift from Brother Rabbit. Brother Rabbit then splits Mr. Dog's tongue with a knife and runs away.

Cal'line Potts Cal'line Potts is the main character in Section XIII. The narrator describes her as a fiercely independent person, who ' 'kept the town in an uproar of laughter." Her husband, Mitchell, "takes up" with another woman named Delphine, also known as Mis' Pheeny. When Cal'line catches Mitch all dressed up for an evening with the other woman, she grabs

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Mrs. Tony Roberts Mrs. Tony Roberts is the main character of the first section of "The Eatonville Anthology." She goes about the town of Eatonville whining, begging, and pleading with shopkeepers for free merchandise or for goods at a discount. According to the narrator of the story, Mr. Roberts gives her enough money to

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support their family, and her whining seems to be a bargaining tool in her dealings with the shopkeepers.

response of the community. In general, the people of the town are amused and entertained by the eccentric characters being described.

Sewell

The vignettes in Hurston's "The Eatonville Anthology'' collectively reflect the powerful sense of community found in areas where certain cultural groups fight for existence within a larger dominant culture. The African-American, Latin-American, and Asian-American cultures are examples of the many cultural systems that subsist within the dominant Anglo-European culture of the United States. Often the need for community is emphasized by both the culture itself and the individual's need to develop a sense of safety and self-identity. Community is more than a shared genetic code in ' 'Anthology"; it is a bond among people who share common life experiences. The people in Eatonville draw together because they acknowledge shared experiences, and they preserve those experiences through stories. By doing so, the community is assured of its continuity, and members of the village are assured a sense of safety and belonging. Preservation of their community is especially important because it exists within the context of a larger dominant culture.

Sewell is the town hermit. Section VIII recounts his frequent moves and his relationship with his chickens, who have ' 'gotten accustomed to his relocations." Sewell is another example of a character around which Eatonville residents have made up stories and myths.

Coon Taylor Coon Taylor is the subject of Section VI. He is a thief who steals frequently from Joe Clarke's gardens. On one occasion, Clarke has fallen asleep in his melon patch while waiting for Coon to show up. When Coon bursts open a melon on what he thinks is a tree stump, it turns out to be Joe's head. In another episode, Clarke catches Coon in his sugar cane patch and makes Coon leave town for three months.

Daisy Taylor Daisy Taylor is the town vamp. She is a flirt who comes to the town post office to socialize with the men who gather there. After a series of flirtations with different men, Daisy focuses on Mr. Albert Grooms, who is married. One Saturday evening, Daisy boasts of her supposed relationship with Albert in front of his wife, Laura. After encouragement from another resident, Laura takes an axe handle and beats Daisy senseless. Readers are apt to be sympathetic toward Mrs. Grooms because of Daisy's taunting, and the beaten Daisy flees Eatonville at the conclusion of this section.

Preservation of Culture Storytelling guarantees that a social system endures. A community and its people can be remembered and its customs preserved through the telling of stories. The individual stories in "The Eatonville Anthology" demonstrate how the citizens of a small, rural community are connected in spirit and culture. As a whole, the stories present a coherent picture of the lives, language, and social structure of Eatonville in the early 1920s.

The Art of Storytelling

Themes Community Many of the fourteen profiles in "The Eatonville Anthology" open with a statement on the outstanding quality of the character they feature. This statement typically defines the character's social status in the community. Whenever this introduction focuses on a negative quality, the narrator defends the character's negative trait with a modification or explanation. With this strategy the narrator signals acceptance of each individual and describes the

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Storytelling is an integral part of community life in Hurston's Eatonville. Literary scholars and critics alike have come to understand that not only is the act of telling a story an art, but it is also an inherent part of the modern African-American tradition. The oral tradition of storytelling usually reflects the lack of a system of concrete signs for the spoken word. Sometimes the language itself does not have an alphabet or other concrete images for communication; at other times, the people using the language do not have access to these symbols. In the case of African-American slaves, most never learned to write. Thus, their initial decades in the United States were recorded and preserved largely through oral traditions.

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The term "storytelling" also refers to exaggerations or outright lies that are told to emphasize a point. Several of the stories in "The Eatonville Anthology'' play with the other implied meanings of the word "storytelling." By providing examples of local myths and exaggerated tales, the "stories'' of' 'Anthology'' capture the people and character of the town. The woman who begs for food when she is able to afford it, the thieving dog Tippy, and the talltale about the old man and his first encounter with a train are all examples of tales and personalities that have been embellished by the local townspeople.

Style Point of View "The Eatonville Anthology" is an excellent example of those literary texts in which the narrative exists primarily to demonstrate forms of traditional oral narration. The work consists of fourteen parts based loosely on folktales, jokes, and the author's childhood memories. The thirteenth piece appears unfinished, whether by authorial intent or publishing error. Although each of these stories is itself a separate tale, the impression given is that the narrator is a member of the community and is conveying a running history of Eatonville. The sense that this history has been an accepted part of the town's culture for many years is also conveyed in the text. Despite this, the final narrative impression is that of a third-person, objective observer.

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Topics for Further Study Community is a consistent theme in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and the primary bond among the smaller stories contained in ' "The Eatonville Anthology." How does the image of a front porch act as a symbol of the social concept of community? Cite specific incidents from the story that prove this connection. How does the narrator's viewpoint direct the reader's understanding and approval of the citizens presented in "The Eatonville Anthology" ? Discuss specific examples. Hurston has been hailed as a "local colorist." What elements found in "The Eatonville Anthology" are specific to the rural area of central Florida where Eatonville is located? What descriptive details contribute to the reader's understanding of the location? Do the characters' speech patterns contribute to the story's presentation of local color? If so, how? How is the issue of race perceived in Eatonville? How does myth differ from folklore? Which African-American myths or folktales are most recognizable in this work? Discuss the significance of these tales within the context of this story.

Structure "The Eatonville Anthology" is broken into fourteen separate stories. Originally, an anthology was a collection of short poems. Today an anthology consists of any collection of poems, stories, songs, or excerpts, which are chosen by a compiler, usually an editor. In this case, the narrator functions as the editor because he or she has chosen which stories to tell.

the models for Hurston's factual and fictitious tales in the ' 'Anthology.'' In addition to the recognizable Florida landscape and landmarks that fill the stories, Hurston contributes realistic voices to her narrative by reproducing as precisely as possible the sounds of the spoken dialect used in this 1920s AfricanAmerican rural community.

Local Color The term "local color" refers to the way a writer exploits the speech, dress, mannerisms, habits of thought, and topography specific to a certain geographical region in an attempt to portray a community as realistically as possible. The Florida community of Eatonville and its townspeople were

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Signifying as a Literary Device "Signifying" is a literary device of great interest to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a renowned critic and scholar. His complete investigation and explanation of this literary phenomenon is found in his seminal text, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory ofAfrican-

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American Literary Criticism. The concept of signifying has been defined by Rita Hooks as ' 'rhetorical games played out in the black vernacular tradition.'' Signifying has also been called "playing the dozens"—a contest in which people insult each other to gain an upper hand—and "specifying." Signifying combines all three levels of storytelling; relating a story, exaggerating, and downright lying, into a complex narrative design. The storyteller consciously manipulates the narrative and the audience and "signifies on" them by tricking the audience with different levels of meaning. Signifying is often used to rectify an imbalance of power. By writing about the community of Eatonville, Hurston is not simply relating local legends and folktales, but also preserving history. The Eatonville residents play the dozens with each other and exaggerate tales about their neighbors. For example, Mr. McDuffy insults his wife by telling her "there's no sense in her shouting, as big a devil as she is." He also says that ' 'his fist was just as hard as her head." Section VII of ' 'Anthology'' describes several residents of the town who are great liars. One resident contends, for example, that he witnessed a doctor remove all the organs of a patient and then reinstall them without any harm to her at all. These exchanges of insults and exaggerations run throughout the story, and Hurston uses the characters who signify on each other to make a larger point. Her interest in anthropology—the study of human beings, social relations, and culture—is reflected in ' 'The Eatonville Anthology." Hurston's combination of AfricanAmerican folklore, anthropological concerns, and childhood memories in "Anthology" enables the story to record history, study a culture, and comment on relations between people all at the same time. By disguising such a study within the form of simple stories, Hurston has employed the literary device of signifying in "Anthology" to great effect.

Historical Context Cultural Pride The period of the 1920s was marked by a boom in economic prosperity followed by a stock market crash in 1929 and a depression lasting well into the next decade. "The Eatonville Anthology," published in 1926, describes a black community in the South and touches little upon affairs outside of the community. Mentioning the World War in Section XI gives readers some historical context, but the

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main focus of the story is on Eatonville and its residents. Racial conflicts, economic hardships, and other issues are not major themes in the story. The story captures the traditions and lore of Eatonville's people in its brief sketches, and Hurston's pride in her African-American heritage is clearly evident. Her use of dialect in the story, and her description of customs and folklore provide readers with a piece of Eatonville's history.

The Great Migration During the period of 1910-1950, many blacks moved from the agricultural South to the industrial North in an effort to secure jobs. This "Great Migration'' was opposed by the white power structure in the South. Needing the labor that black sharecroppers provided, states such as Alabama and Mississippi attempted to prevent blacks from leaving. However, cities such as Detroit, New York, and Chicago received hundreds of thousands of black immigrants who migrated North in hopes of finding economic prosperity and less oppressive conditions than those existing in the South. Harlem became a haven for many blacks fleeing the South, and the city experienced a cultural awakening known as the "Harlem Renaissance."

Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was the first intellectual and artistic movement that brought AfricanAmerican writers and artists to the attention of the entire nation. Critics mark the defining event of the Harlem Renaissance as the 1925 publication of The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology edited by Alain Locke. The major force of the movement was generated from a large group of black artists who lived in New York during the 1920s. This gathering of artists and intellectuals led to an outburst of literary, artistic, and musical work that began to receive widespread recognition and critical appraisal. African-American writers in this group included: Langston Hughes, poet, novelist, and playwright; Jean Toomer, author of the distinguished collection of poetry and poetic prose entitled Cane; the poets Countee Cullen and Claude McKay; the novelists Eric Waldron and Zora Neale Hurston; and the poet and novelist Arna Bon temps, who was to become the historian of the movement.

Folklore and Tradition After graduating from Barnard College in New York City, Hurston returned to Eatonville to study

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Compare &

Contrast 1920s: In 1920, Marcus Garvey organizes the first Universal Negro Improvement Association which opens with 25,000 delegates in attendance, and Garvey begins to promote his "back to Africa" movement.

remarks to her eight years earlier while he served on the Equal Opportunity Commission. Sexual harassment in the workplace becomes a focus of national attention.

1990s: On October 16, 1995, Louis Farrakhan organizes the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of thousands of men gather on the Mall in a demonstration of unity, pride and brotherhood.

1920s: The National Woman's party meets in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1922 and endorses an Equal Rights Amendment drafted by founder Alice Paul.

1920: Women's suffrage is proclaimed in effect August 26 following Tennessee's ratification of the nineteenth amendment. 1990s: In 1991 Anita Hill charges that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas made indecent

1990s: Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, women such as Loida N. Lewis, the chairperson and CEO of Beatrice International, a company with $2.1 billion in revenues, continue to assume important roles in business, politics, and culture.

her townspeople. As an anthropologist, she treasured the myths, legends, and folklore that combined to create the unique African-American culture. Hurston's cultural pride and anthropological interests fused in her fiction. She recorded the voice of her native townspeople in an authentic manner, effectively capturing the mood, speech patterns, attitudes, and customs of Eatonville. Today, one of the most noted features of Hurston's fiction is her use of the African-American dialect in the speech of her characters. The movement toward declaring and preserving black pride and identity that began in the 1920s continues to grow.

"The Eatonville Anthology" has attracted critical attention for a variety of reasons. Initially, critics examined this story in relation to other anthologies such as Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. In his essay entitled ' 'The Establishment of Community in Zora Neale Hurston's 'The Eatonville Anthology' and Rolando Hinojosa's 'Estampas del valle'," critic Heiner Bus sees similarities between the works of such mainstream male writers and Hurston's story. The need for community and identity is felt particularly by minorities who live within a larger mainstream society, claims Bus. He writes: ' The trust in the power of the word as a tool to overcome powerlessness, forced muteness, is a first step towards identity and visibility as a group."

Critical Overview

Robert Hemenway discusses the significance of ' 'The Eatonville Anthology'' in his book Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. He calls the story Hurston's "most effective attempt at representing the original tale-telling context [and] the best written representation of her oral art." Hemenway further praises "The Eatonville Anthology" for its festive mood, which conjures the image of Hurston telling stories at a party. Integrat-

After suffering many years in obscurity, Hurston's work began to garner more critical attention in 1973. In that year, noted African-American author Alice Walker travelled to Alabama to find and mark Hurston's grave. This event marked the beginning of a renewed interest in Hurston's work.

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ing her interest in anthropology into her fiction, Hurston incorporated traditional African-American folklore into her tales of Eatonville. As a source of local color, "The Eatonville Anthology" is a treasure of African-American dialect and central Florida rural geography. Critic Geneva Cobb-Moore discusses this aspect of the story in her essay "Zora Neale Hurston as Local Colorist." Cobb-Moore writes: "Florida's rich topography, the Eatonville community, and Joe Clarke's store porch are permanent features in Hurston's local colorist works." The critic elaborates on Hurston's significance, noting that literary critics ' 'have come to acknowledge the national or even universal dimensions and implications of regional literature and see it as echoing certain moral and historical truths about our humanity."

Criticism Judy Sobeloff Judy Sobeloff is an instructor at the University of Michigan and the winner of the PEN Northwest Fellowship writing residency award. In the following essay, Sobeloff discusses the themes, origins, and construction of Hurston's story "The Eatonville Anthology.'' A major figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston published more books in her lifetime than any other African-American woman, spoke at major universities and received honorary doctorates, and was described in the New York Herald Tribune as being one of the nation's top writers. Her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is widely considered a masterpiece today, and one of the most important works of fiction ever written by an African-American woman. Alice Walker insists in the foreword to Hurston's biography: "There is no book more important to me than this one." Yet Hurston died in poverty in 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave. In an essay published in 1972, biographer Robert Hemenway describes her as ' 'one of the most significant unread authors in America." The following year, however, Walker traveled to Florida to find and honor Hurston's grave. According to scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke in the ' 'Introduction' ' to The Complete Stories a rising black femi-

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nist movement "seized upon [Hurston] as the canonical black foremother." This recognition thus restored Hurston's place in the American literary landscape. Hurston was notable as a novelist, short story writer, critic, and also as the country's most important collector of African-American folklore. Born and raised in the small, all-black community of Eatonville, Florida, she had a lifelong interest in anthropology and returned to Eatonville after graduating from Barnard College in New York City to study her townspeople. She frequently used material she gathered in her anthropological work in her fiction. "The Eatonville Anthology" is based on real people and real events of Eatonville, and Hemenway considers it to be Hurston's most successful attempt to "fuse folklore and fiction." While Hurston achieved success during her lifetime, she could be controversial and provocative as well. Her writing might be considered "politically incorrect" by some. Hurston's use of dialect and stereotypes in her writing has received praise from critics, but she has also been faulted for portraying African Americans negatively. Hurston's views on race relations were also controversial. She told at least one reporter that she opposed desegregation, though as Walker pointed out, a woman from an allblack town where blacks held all positions of power could quite reasonably see little to be gained from integrating with whites. Hurston's writing differed sharply from other women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. It frequently rejected upper middle-class values, it employed African-American dialect, and her female characters were interested in sex. Critic P. Gabrielle Foreman holds in her essay in Black American Literature Forum that Hurston was unlike other black women writers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen. Foreman feels that these writers ' 'composed books, draped among other things, with women who don heavy silks and satins and who adorn their satiny yellow skin with pretty party dresses described in detail." Hurston wrote of characters whose response to life was visceral, and who lived according to the rituals of their own communities. Hurston frequently had to struggle to make a living in the latter part of her life. After interest in black literature and art waned at the end of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston ceased to write about the people and customs of Eatonville. She turned

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What Do I Read Next? Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's most celebrated novel, first published in 1937. A classic of African-American Literature, it tells the story of Janie Crawford's evolving selfhood through three marriages. The Bluest Eye, written by Toni Morrison and published in 1970, is the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old black girl who believes she is ugly and longs for blue eyes. Her obsession with blue eyes turns to insanity after her father rapes her and she gives birth to a premature baby who later dies. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism (1988) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a study in which Gates explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature. Gates explains a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.

toward a more conservative choice of material: her last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, concerned the lives of white characters, a radical change in subject matter for Hurston. Her book after that, which she had been toiling over when she died, was a biography of the Roman ruler Herod the Great, the rebuilder of Jerusalem's Great Temple. Hurston's "The Eatonville Anthology," first published in The Messenger magazine in three installments in 1926, has attracted attention for a variety of reasons. Critic Heiner Bus examines "The Eatonville Anthology" in his essay "The Establishment of Community in Zora Neale Hurston's 'The Eatonville Anthology' and Rolando Hinojosa's 'Estampas del valle'." Bus discusses Hurston's story in the context of other well-known works about American small-town life, such as Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915), Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Sinclair Lewis' Main Street (1920), and Thornton

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Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1980), by Robert E. Hemenway, is the story of Hurston and her extremely colorful life and career. It features a foreword by Alice Walker and contains extensive notes and bibliography. In addition to the details of Hurston's life, this text is a good source for information on the Harlem Renaissance. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan by Trudier Harris, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, discusses how Southern literature is celebrated. Harris asserts that Hurston, Naylor, and Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill them with anticipation. Harris gives Hurston special recognition as a woman writing during the Harlem Renaissance and discusses how her various roles as an anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist impact her work.

Wilder's Our Town (1938), all of which were written by white men. Bus sees similarities between the works of mainstream and minority authors but believes that themes like community and continuity, certainly prevalent in ' "The Eatonville Anthology," (in segment XI, Double-Shuffle, for example), have "special connotations in the work of ethnic writers." The need for community and identity is particularly felt by minorities who live within a larger mainstream society. Bus writes: "The trust in the power of the word as a tool to overcome powerlessness, forced muteness, is a first step towards identity and visibility as a group." Hurston's portrayal of Eatonville gives her community visibility and power. Hurston's remarkable ear for dialect and use of authentic detail captures the words of her townspeople just as they would have spoken them. Hemenway sees the significance of "The Eatonville Anthology" as "Hurston's most effec-

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Hurston incorporated pieces of traditional AfricanAmerican folklore into 'The Eatonville Anthology,1 and one of the most interesting aspects of the story is the way she later used bits of it again and again in her other works."

live attempt at representing the original tale-telling context [and] the best written representation of her oral art." He further observes that ' 'The Eatonville Anthology" is the "literary equivalent of Hurston's memorable performances at parties. The reader has the impression of sitting in a corner listening to anecdotes." Some of the events described in "Anthology" actually occurred in Eatonville—for example, the thieving dog Tippy and Mrs. Tony Roberts, the pleading woman, among others, were real according to Hemenway. Other events in the story are based on "folktales or jokes known not only to Hurston but to many other traditional storytellers." Hemenway continues: "Joe Lindsay, the greatest liar in the village, tells a tale so common that folklorists have classified it as Type 660: The Three Doctors."' Heiner Bus comments on Hurston's use of the Brer Rabbit tale in a footnote to his essay, noting that the Brer Rabbit story appears in both the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend and in The Book of Negro Folklore. According to his interpretation,' 'projecting human behavior into the animal world signifies . . . an effort to conjure up imperial power in a situation of oppression." Hurston incorporated pieces of traditional African-American folklore into "The Eatonville Anthology,' ' and one of the most interesting aspects of the story is the way she later used bits of it again and again in her other works. Alice Walker observes: "Everything she experienced in Eatonville she eventually put into her books. Indeed, one gets the feeling that she tried over and over again with the

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same material until she felt she had gotten it right." For example, the real mayor of Eatonville, Joe Clarke, appears in "The Eatonville Anthology" and also turns up later in Their Eyes Were Watching God, as Mayor Jody Starks. Segment IX of "Eatonville" which focuses on Joe's unhappy "softlooking, middle-aged'' wife becomes the seed for Jody and Janie's relationship in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Bus observes that Daisy Taylor, of segment XII, reappears in an unpublished play Hurston wrote with Langston Hughes entitled Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. The Brer Rabbit segment appears again in Hurston's collection of folklore, Mules and Men. Critic JoAnne Cornwell sees Brazzle's mule of segment VII in ' 'Anthology'' in the mule belonging to Matt Bonner in Their Eyes and pleading Mrs. Roberts, of segment I, still pleading in the form of Mrs. Robbins, also in Their Eyes. Hemenway reports that the events of segment II, Turpentine Love, are repeated in Seraph in the Suwanee, except with white characters instead of blacks. He also points out the events described in ' 'Pants and Cal'line'' are based on Hurston's Aunt Cal'line and her Uncle Jim in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, with one notable difference. The difference highlights a further reason ' 'The Eatonville Anthology" is important to study: the story was overlooked (or treated carelessly) in much the same way Hurston herself was overlooked in the latter part of her life. According to Hemenway, a "printing mishap" caused "Pants and Cal'line," (Segment XIII) to "go incomplete'' when the printer or editor apparently lost part of the story. In the real-life incident that is the basis for this section, Hurston's aunt tracked down her husband at the home of one of his mistresses and returned home with his pants slung over an axe. In ' "The Eatonville Anthology," the axe that Cal'line is mysteriously carrying on her way to Delphine's is never explained. The reader never learns the outcome of the confrontation, nor is the significance of the "Pants" of the title ever explained. According to Hemenway, ' 'the error does nothing more than indicate some of the loose editorial practices of the understaffed, underpaid, overworked Messenger office," the Messenger being the ' 'only radical Negro magazine in America'' at that time. The omission was not intentional, but nonetheless, as Andrew Crosland points out, "The Eatonville Anthology" has been reprinted in several anthologies, due to "the Hurston revival," but without the explanation necessary to understand the story.

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Hurston's talents were recognized and applauded during the Harlem Renaissance, then largely forgotten for years. Studying "The Eatonville Anthology" will further the reader's understanding and appreciation of the town that gave rise to this story and the larger works that grew out of it as well. Source: Judy Sobeloff, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

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y capturing the reality, the vivacity and the cultural wealth of the Eatonville community, Hurston immortalizes folk

Geneva Cobb-Moore In the following article, Cobb-Moore analyzes Hurston 's writing as an example o f ' 'local color,'' stories that represent the everyday life of a particular region, in this case, Eatonville, Florida. Since Zora Neale Hurston's death in 1960, an impressive number of artists and scholars have rescued her from an undeserved obscurity, best symbolized by her burial in an unmarked grave in a segregated potter's field. They have restored to her in death the fame and following that eluded her in life. Hurston's rescue began in 1973 when Alice Walker flew to Florida and visited Lee-Peek Mortuary in Fort Pierce to locate the cemetery where Hurston is buried. Finding what she believed was the grave, Walker then had a monument erected for the site. In 1977, Robert Hemenway published her biography, Zora Neale Hurston, to national acclaim. Both Walker and Hemenway pay respect to a writer whom Barbara Christian in Black Women Novelists and Henry Louis Gates in ' 'A Negro Way of Saying" correctly assert is the literary model for the contemporary African-American female writer who writes realistic fiction of black women seeking self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. Since Mary Helen Washington's lament in Black-Eyed Susans (1975) about Hurston's neglect in literature and women's studies courses across America, Hurston's most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), has become a perennial classroom favorite. There is an annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Hurston's hometown, Eatonville, Florida, which N. Y. Nathiri, one of Hurston's most devoted loyalists, coordinates. In 1991, Nathiri edited an informational book, Zora!, on Hurston and Eatonville, containing memories of the writer by relatives and friends. From those who misunderstood her, like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who thought her "black-minstrel" characters were created to humor a patronizing white audience, to those who loved her, like Alice Walker, Mary Ellen Washington, and Barbara Christian, who thought her a controversial but brilliant feminist, Zora Neale Hurston has stirred

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the emotions of critics and devotees in a variety of ways and has been called alternately minstrel, novelist, anthropologist, voodoo priestess, feminist, and folklorist. I think her real significance as writerfolklorist is best summarized by her biographer, Robert Hemenway, who writes: Zora was concerned less with the tactics of racial uplift than with the unexamined prejudice of American social science. She became a folklorist at a time when white sociologists were obsessed with what they thought was pathology in black behavior, when white psychologists spoke of the deviance in black mental health, and when the discipline of anthropology used a research model that identified black people as suffering from cultural deprivation. Hurston's folklore collections refuted these stereotypes by celebrating the distinctiveness of traditional black culture, and her scholarship is now recognized by revisionist scientists questioning the racial assumptions of modern cultural theory.

Because the Eatonville townspeople were the models of Hurston's factual and fictive folksy, cultural richness, I find that she emerges most clearly as something that no critic, to my knowledge, has yet remarked upon: local colorist. Local color as a genre and technique emerged after the Civil War in 1868 with Bret Harte's "fresh pictures of California mining camps," although in its nineteenth-century manifestations local color often painted a rather shallow, genteel picture of life. But the concept has undergone considerable changes because of writers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Zora Neale Hurston. Critics now acknowledge the national or even universal dimensions and implications of regional literature and see it as echoing certain moral and historical truths about our humanity....

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Florida's rich topography, the Eatonville community, and Joe Clarke's store porch are permanent features in Hurston's local colorist works. Eatonville is at the heart of her upbringing, from living in this all-black town to attending an all-black school to being an inheritor of an all-black oral tradition, revived gloriously and hilariously on a local entrepreneur' s front porch where people gathered to bask and bake in a hot Florida sun. When Hurston writes in "How It Feels to be Colored Me" that she is not "tragically colored" and does not belong to the "sobbing school of Negrohood who hold[s] that Nature somehow has given them a ... dirty deal," we look to the proud racial heritage of the Eatonville community to understand and appreciate her racial pride. This was no easy feat in the Jim Crow decades of the 1920s, 30s and 40s when African-Americans were made to feel their apartness from the rest of humanity by ubiquitous signs that read ' 'For Whites'' and "For Coloreds." Hurston's attitude and her emergence as a local colorist was bolstered by Columbia University anthropologist and scholar Franz Boas, a German emigre, who encouraged Hurston as a Barnard College student to develop the anthropological tools required to enable her to return to Eatonville and collect, record, and examine the rich folk material passed around matter-offactly on Clarke's store porch. It was Boas who questioned the theory of Anglo-Saxon superiority in the twentieth century, stating it "is hardly possible to predict what would be the achievement of the Negro if he were able to live with Whites on absolutely equal terms." Hurston's return to the South and to Florida was essential to her development as scholar of local culture and to her legacy as a precursor of Afrocentric scholars. Boas and Hurston knew that unlike black Northerners, black Southerners retained distinct Africanisms due to the rigidity of a Southern antebellum and post-bellum racial system that kept whites and blacks separated, culturally as well as physically. In Mules and Men Hurston writes: ' 'I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew that the town was full of material and that I could get it without hurt, harm or danger . . . As I crossed the Maitland-Eatonville township line I could see a group on the store porch. I was delighted." Many of the folktales Hurston retells are a curious blend of the townspeople's healthy racial ethnocentrism, rooted and nurtured in a region that appears lovely but primeval, and their hilarious

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racial stereotyping. Consider the tale of Gold, a bold woman who enters the male-dominated sanctuary of Joe Clarke's porch and tells the tale of how God "gave out color": ... one day He said, 'Tomorrow morning, at seven o'clock sharp, I aim to give out color. Everybody be here on time. I got plenty of creating to do tomorrow, and I want to give out this color and get it over wid. Everybody be' round de throne at seven o'clock tomorrow morning. So next morning at seven o'clock, God was sitting on His throne with His big crown on His head and seven suns circling around His head. Great multitudes was standing around the throne waiting to get their color. God sat up there and looked east, and He looked west, and He looked north and He looked Australia, and blazing worlds were falling off His teeth. So He looked over to His left and moved His hands over a crowd, and said, 'You's yellow people'.... He looked at another crowd... and said, 'You's red folks!'.... He looked towards the center and moved His hand over another crowd and said, 'You's white folks!'... Then God looked way over to the right and said, 'Look here, Gabriel, I miss a lot of multitudes from around the throne this morning'.... Gabriel run off and started to hunting around. Way after while, he found the missing multitudes lying around on the grass by the Sea of Life, fast asleep. So Gabriel woke them up and told them.... Old Maker is might wore out from waiting. Fool with Him and He won't give out no more color!... they all jumped up and went running towards the throne, hollering, 'Give us our color! We want our color! We got just as much right to color as anybody else'.... [they were] pushing and shoving.... God said, 'Here! Here! Git back! Git back!'... they misunderstood Him, and thought He said, 'Git black!' So they just got black, and kept the thing-a-going!....

A favorite Hurston remark to be found in almost all of her fiction is "the porch laughed" or "the porch was boiling now." The use of metonymy stresses the communal gathering on Joe Clarke's store porch and the townspeople's enjoyment. The tall-tales had, also, the distinction of breaking the monopoly of daily tedium while encouraging the socialization of men and women who were miraculously transformed on the porch into griots, poets, and philosophers. Hurston makes the reader cognizant of a congenial, group-like ethos of Eatonville society. The people were one. According to Levine, even this communal oneness is rooted deeply in the early African-American experience and its slave legacy. Levine argues that "in the midst of the brutalities and injustices of the Antebellum and post-bellum racial systems, black men and women were able to find the means to sustain a far greater degree of self-pride and group cohesion than the system they lived under ever intended for them to be able to do.'' Joe Clarke's store porch was not only a

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place for entertainment and cultural exchanges, it was, too, a safe haven, sheltering locals from a larger hostile environment while creating the illusion (or perhaps the reality) that no other world existed or mattered.... Finally, Zora Neale Hurston develops a distinctive African-American female voice in literature. It is a voice deeply rooted in the African-American experience from Africa to America. As a local colorist, Hurston presents an intimate portrayal of lives changed and yet strangely unchanged by the experiences of the African Diaspora. By capturing the reality, the vivacity and the cultural wealth of the Eatonville community, Hurston immortalizes folk characters and their spirited survival and expands the meaning of local color. She proves once and for all that while physical bodies can be restricted, the imagination is always free. Source: Geneva Cobb-Moore, "Zora Neale Hurston as Local Colorist," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 25-34.

Andrew Crosland In the following excerpt, Crosland alerts readers of "The Eatonville Anthology" to editorial errors in one of the story's sections, which Hurston never corrected due to the story's lack of attention in her lifetime. Several times during Zora Neale Hurston's career, the printed texts of her works did not reflect her exact intentions. These textual corruptions hurt her reputation as a creative artist. Unfortunately, the textual problems that recurred during her lifetime have also haunted the posthumous revival of her reputation begun by Alice Walker in 1975. Zora Neale Hurston first published "The Eatonville Anthology" serially in the 1926 September, October, and November issues of the Messenger. The work consists of fourteen parts variously based on folk tales, jokes, or Hurston's childhood memories. This composite communicates the black ethos which nurtured the author in her early years. The thirteenth piece in "The Eatonville Anthology," published at the end of the segment appearing in the October Messenger, treats a confrontation between Sister Cal'line Potts and her roaming husband Mitchell. She spots him sneaking away to visit his girlfriend with a gift of new shoes.

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The betrayed wife picks up an axe and stalks him, much to the amusement of the idlers at Clark's store who watch both pass. Then the story ends abruptly. Sister Cal'line and Mitchell are mentioned nowhere else in the "Anthology," and their fate is never disclosed. Readers are further perplexed by the title of this piece,' 'Pants and Cal'line," because the story contains no reference to pants. Robert Hemenway, Hurston's biographer, offers an explanation. He says that "a printing mishap caused . .. "Pants and Cal'line" to go incomplete, the printer or editor apparently losing part of the story." ' The Eatonville Anthology" was not reprinted during Hurston's lifetime, so she had no opportunity to publish a corrected text. She did, however, tell the story again in her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. This version is about Hurston's Aunt Caroline and Uncle Jim. In it, Caroline follows Jim to his girlfriend's house, breaks in using the axe, and chases away her husband, who is in his underwear. She follows him home, her axe draped with his pants and a pair of new shoes. This telling of the story provides a satisfactory ending for "Pants and Cal'line" and explains the title. Hurston died in poverty and obscurity in 1960, her literary reputation at its nadir. In 1975, Alice Walker published' 'In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms., beginning a revival of Hurston's literary reputation. Four years later, Walker edited a collection of Hurston's work titled / Love Myself When I Am Laughing ... and Then When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. This book reprints the corrupted text of "The Eatonville Anthology" as well as the excerpt from which tells the story again. The two pieces are not printed side-by-side, end no editorial note links them. Yet the alert reader should be able to determine what is missing from the "Anthology."

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The Hurston revival is apparently successful, and a growing numberofworksby andabouther are making their wayinto print. ' 'TheEatonville Anthology" has been included in TheNorton Bookof American Short Stories (1988)and in TheNorton Anthologyof American Literature (1989).... Source: Andrew Crosland, "TheText of Zora NealeHurston: A Caution," in CIA Journal, Vol.XXXVII, No. 4, June, 1994, pp. 420-21.

Heiner Bus In the following essay, Bus discusses Eatonville Anthology "as anexample of apresentation of a stable communityinwhich change is not desirable. Sucha workismore correctly readas an exampleof storytelling,not drama.

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and Rolando Hinojosa's 'Estampas del valle' European PerspectivesonHispanic Literature oftheUnited States, edited by Genvieve Fabre, Arte Publico 1988, pp. 66-81.

(19 Press,

Sources "Conjure Into Being: Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Were Watching God'," on Rita Hooks' homepage, Petersboro Junior College, http://splavc.spjc.cc.fl.us/hooks/ Zorasig.html, 1997.

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Cornwell, JoAnne. "Searching for Zora in Alice's Garden: Rites of Passage inHurston's Their Eyes WereWatchingGod and Walker's TheThird Lifeof GrangeCopeland, " in Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: TheCommon Bond, edited by Lillie P. Howard, Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 97-107 Foreman, P. Gabrielle. "LookingBack from Zora, orTalking Out Both Sides My Mouth for Those WhoHave Two Ears, "in Black American Literature Forum,Volume 24, no. 4, 1990, pp. 649-666. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Sieglinde Lemke. "Introduction," in The Complete Stories, by Zora Neale Hurston, HarperCollins, 1995, pp.ix-xxiii. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, University ofIllinois, 1980.

Source: Heiner Bus, Zora Neale Hurston's

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"TheEstablishment of Community in The Eatonville Anthology'

Walker, Alice. "Foreword," in ILove Myself WhenI Am Laughing ... And Then Again When I AmLooking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, Feminist (1926)1979. Press,

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The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World Gabriel Garcia Marquez began writing fiction as a young journalist in Bogota, Colombia, in the late 1940s. His masterpiece, Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), received worldwide critical acclaim when it was published, first in Spanish in 1967 and then in translation after 1970. Many of his short stories were written before this novel, but were not published collectively until 1972 or later. Thus, readers and critics were already familiar with his style when they read ' "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," one of the short stories published in Leaf Storm and Other Stories in 1972.

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Garcia Marquez, considered by many to be Colombia's foremost writer, has gained much of his recognition by writing stories that operate on a mythical, almost allegorical, level.' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' takes this type of storytelling into a realm of the fantastic that seems to have no connection to a particular time or place. Nevertheless, Garcia Marquez has been influenced by his upbringing in a coastal Colombian village during the turbulent 1930s. While drawing direct parallels between specific locations and time periods is possible, the nature of Garcia Marquez's work is such that readers can understand his characters not only as inhabitants of a local village but, simultaneously, as universal examples of the human race as well. "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' has always interested critics, both those who interpret the story as a comment on Colombian

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history or politics and those who seek more global applications for the lessons the story imparts. Many post-modern writers have shown interest in Garcia Marquez's work as well. They include Chilean writer Isabelle Allende and American writer Toni Morrison, both of whom have adapted Garcia Marquez's magic realism approach in their own works.

Author Biography Born in 1928, Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez spent the first eight years of his life in the small Colombian village of Aracataca. His grandmother cultivated his imagination with fantastic stories of Colombian history and myth. Her influence, combined with the superstitions and myths of the townspeople, provided the writer with a rich background from which he created his fiction. Upon returning to Aracataca some years later, Garcia Marquez found the town suffering from many years of economic and social decline. A sense of nostalgia for his first home spurred his sense of history and his desire to preserve the great myths and stories of his childhood. Garcia Marquez attended the University of Bogota. In 1948 it closed down due to civil warfare, and he transferred to the University of Cartegena and entered the journalism field. He eventually left school to pursue this career full time, publishing short pieces of fiction in addition to news stories. His first novella, La hojarasca was published in 1955. It was translated into English in 1972 as the title piece in Leaf Storm and Other Stories, which included the translation of' The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World." Meanwhile, Garcia Marquez's journalism had become increasingly political. After writing a series of articles exposing the carrying of contraband cargo by the Colombian navy, he moved to Europe to avoid the wrath of the government. Most of Garcia Marquez's short stories were written in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Many of these were collected and published in 1972 under such titles as Ojos de perro azul (Eyes of a Blue Dog), and La incredible y triste historia de la Candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada (The Incredible and Sad Story of Poor Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother). Critics generally considered these works unconventional because of their

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use of such experimental techniques as multiple narrators, shifting points of view, and fantastic events. Another collection, Los funerales de la Mama Grande (The Funeral of Big Mama), found an enthusiastic audience who admired its use of archetypal, mythical characters who function in timeless, often nameless, places. Garcia Marquez remains best known, however, for his many novels. He achieved worldwide fame for his 1967 masterpiece Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), which tells the history of the fictional village of Macondo, based on the real history of Aracataca. After living in Paris, and then returning to Colombia, Garcia Marquez settled in Mexico, where he now resides. He is widely considered Colombia's foremost writer. In 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, an indication of his worldwide reputation.

Plot Summary "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" begins when the children of a small coastal village see an unfamiliar bulge in the sea. When it washes up on the beach they realize it is a drowned man. For the rest of the afternoon they play with the corpse until another villager sees them and tells the rest of the villagers. The men of the village then carry the body to the nearest house, remarking that he weighs almost as much as a horse. He is also taller than other men and barely fits in the house. The tiny village sits on the cliff of a sparsely vegetated cape. The villagers twenty or so houses have stone courtyards in which no flowers grow. That evening the men travel to neighboring villages to see if any of them will claim the dead stranger. While they are gone the women of the village care for the drowned man, noticing that the vegetation growing on him comes from distant oceans and that his clothes are tattered. He also seems proud. Not until they finish cleaning the body do the women see how awesome a man he is. He is the most supreme example of a man they have ever seen—the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built. He is so large that nothing in the village will fit him: not a bed, a table, nor a set of clothes. The women decide to make him pants from a sail and a shirt from fine bridal linen so they can bury him

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with dignity. As they sew, they begin to create a fantasy about the man. They think that if such a man lived among them, doors would be wider, ceilings higher, floors and bedsteads stronger, and his wife would be the happiest woman. The man could call fish out of the sea and make flowers grow on the dry cliffs. Even now, because of him, the wind is steadier than ever and the sea more restless. The women secretly compare him to their own men, who suddenly seem the weakest, meanest, and most useless people. They name him Esteban, further personalizing him. They realize that he will have to be dragged along the ground to be buried in the sea. That is when they realize how unhappy he must have been with his body while he was alive. He would have been forever ducking under doorways and hitting his head on the ceiling. When visiting people, he would have had to stand in order not to break his guests' furniture, and he would have never known if people were being polite to him simply because they feared his size. When the women cover his face with a handkerchief he looks so irrevocably dead—and so much like their own men would look—that they cry for him, and he becomes the most destitute, most peaceful, and most obliging man on earth. The men return at dawn with the news that Esteban is not from any of the neighboring villages, and the women rejoice that he belongs to them. The men want to throw the body into the sea and get rid of the intruder, but the more they hurry, the more excuses the women come up with to keep him. One of the men finally expresses anger that the women are making such a fuss over a stranger, and the women remove the handkerchief covering Esteban's face. With one look, the men can see Esteban's shame at his size and for disrupting them. The villagers, now united, hold a splendid funeral for Esteban. The village is filled with flowers and neighbors who have heard of the drowned man. Saddened at having to lose him, the villagers choose a family for him and make everyone his kin. Their sadness is so powerful that sailors at sea who hear their weeping run off course. After Esteban is gone, they know there will always be one missing among them. The villagers now see the barrenness of their village and their lives. After the funeral, they decide to change things: they will build bigger houses so Esteban's memory will have no trouble visiting; they will paint their homes to honor his memory; and they will plant flowers on the cliffs so that in the

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future passengers on ocean liners will smell the aroma and the captains of the ships will point to their roses and say: "That's Esteban's village."

Characters Esteban Although he is a stranger—and a dead stranger at that—Esteban plays a central role in the villagers' lives. He does not speak, yet his face and his body speak for him, telling the villagers how sorry he is to be such a bother, large and cumbersome as he is. They intuit that he is kind and considerate, yet authoritative enough to command the fish to jump into his boat when he is fishing. The women of the village find him ' 'speaking'' to them in other ways, making them compare their husbands to his splendid size and handsome features. His presence in the village forces them to examine their lives and to work together to beautify their village. Esteban exists, then, not in the body of the dead man the village children have found on the beach, but in the minds of the villagers themselves, who are inspired to better their lives.

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The Villagers The inhabitants of this tiny fishing village struggle daily in a harsh climate. Their strip of land is so narrow that there is not even enough room to bury their dead. The village is so small that the drowned man is immediately identified as a stranger, since ' 'they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there." No one in the village is named, increasing the sense that they live and act as a group. The women respond to Esteban with care, then admiration, then longing, and finally, ownership. The men respond at first with irritation and jealousy, but gradually they too begin to feel compassion and pity. The solidarity of the villagers is borne out by the way that all of them take responsibility for Esteban just as all of them will eventually take responsibility for beautifying their village after he is gone. Garcia Marquez used the village of Aracataca and its people as loose models for this story, which also reflects his socialistic beliefs.

Themes When a large drowned man washes up on the beach of a tiny fishing village, his presence inspires the villagers to create fantastic stories about him and to improve their own lives as well.

Myth and the Human Condition ' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' illustrates the collective human tendency to create myths. The form of the story makes clear that the "long ago and far away" setting of the story takes precedence over a reading of the story that places the village in an exact location or time period. Myths often center around heroic figures whose special powers or deeds create an ideal that members of that society may attempt to live up to. Esteban becomes such an ideal for the villagers, who are so inspired by him that they plant beautiful gardens and improve their homes "so that Esteban's memory could go everywhere without bumping into beams." Thus, this once dirty and diminished drowned man inspires an entire village to strive for something better and more beautiful. Such myths last through time and across cultures, as demonstrated at the end of the story when it is predicted that captains of passenger ships will identify "Esteban's village" for curious passengers. That the human imagination seeks explanations for the unknown is the focus of the tale. Much of the

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story involves village women creating stories about Esteban's life and what it would be like to share it with him: "They thought that if that magnificent man had lived in the village, his house would have had the widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor, his bedstead would have been made from a midship frame held together by iron bolts, and his wife would have been the happiest woman." Through their imagination Esteban is first admirable, then lovable, and finally cherished by all. He becomes representative of the whole village, and at his funeral they choose relatives for him in such a way ' 'that through him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen." This act highlights another aspect of the human condition: the need to reach out to others and become connected in some way. By casting Esteban back into the sea from which he came, the villagers recognize the ocean as a bond, a connection between other people and other lands, including the faraway land from which the drowned man originated.

Beauty and Aesthetics The importance of the drowned man to the village is in direct proportion to the villagers' perception of his beauty. When he first washes onto the beach, covered with seaweed and grime, the children of the village think of him as no more than a novel plaything. It is only after the women of the village begin to clean him off that they appreciate his strength and beauty. They are so amazed at his physical being that "there was no room for him in their imagination." But soon they do use their imaginations, attributing to him not only pride and authority, but also obliging tenderness and consideration. Esteban's beauty gains him a sympathetic viewpoint in their imaginations. His beauty and size contrast with not only their men—who by comparison are "the weakest, meanest, and most useless creatures on earth"—but with the village itself. Their hastily constructed homes and empty courtyards on a tiny, bare strip of land reflect the villagers themselves, who have little understanding of or imagination for things outside of their own subsistence. Esteban, by bringing beauty into the village, initiates a permanent change of character for the villagers. Their willingness to reach out to Esteban and claim him as one of their own in order to ' 'lose'' him at the funeral has created a sense that there is something more for them than life and death: there is beauty, something entirely extraordinary. Thus the story of Esteban becomes, for the villagers, the story about the power of beauty to enter and change their lives.

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Style The arrival of a large drowned man on their shores inspires the imagination of the inhabitants of a tiny fishing village.

Point of View The simplicity with which "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" is told conceals a rather complex narrative technique. The villagers, finding a drowned man on their beach, begin to admire and then love him as they prepare him for proper burial. The third-person narrator, however, only describes the man through the eyes of the villagers. It is their conceptualization of the drowned man, not any objective viewpoint, that the reader receives. Furthermore, the point of view shifts away from the villagers at certain times in the narrative, such as when the imaginary hostess worries about her chair and he ' 'never knowing perhaps that the ones who said don't go, Esteban, at least wait till the coffee's ready, were the ones who later on would whisper the big boob finally left, how nice, the handsome fool has gone." This complex approach to narration provides cues not only about Esteban, but about the villagers themselves as they view him in the context of their own lives.

Setting The setting of the story is also more complex than it first seems. Because no exact location is named and the villagers appear to be isolated from the outside world, the village has the feel of a faraway land. The village does not have modern technology; they use a primitive, wheelless sled to convey Esteban to his funeral. Thus the story occupies a timeless, prehistoric era. Nevertheless, the seaside village is very similar to the coastal areas near Garcia Marquez's childhood home, and the ocean liners mentioned at the end of the story verify that this is an actual location in the present day which can be reached. The village, then, exists both as a faraway, mythical place, and as an actual locale. It represents something magic or mythical, but also something real.

Magic Realism Although the term was first used to refer to a modern type of painting in the 1920s, magic realism later became associated with a particular type of fiction, especially that written by Latin Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Magic realist fiction incorporates both fantastic events and realistic details.

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Topics for Further Study Research La Violencia, Colombia's fifteen-year period of civil strife, and consider ways in which ' "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' might be a comment on the events occurring in Colombia at this time. Look for information on the following religious and mythological figures in the story and analyze their significance to the work: St. Stephen, Estevanico, Jonah, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl. Read a chapter of Homer's Odyssey and look for points of similarity between Homer's tale and the events of this story. Explore the psychology of totemism and determine what Esteban has come to symbolize for the villagers.

The arrival of a "Wednesday dead body" on the shore of a fishing village is not necessarily a magical event. What brings the story into the realm of the fabulous is the reaction of the villagers, whose response to his arrival is anything but ordinary. That a dead man can have so much influence on a village full of people who seem used to finding drowning victims on their beach creates a sense that this event is something extraordinary. The mythical namelessness of the village and the historically vague setting add to this perception. At the same time, details such as the ocean liner at the end of the story ground it firmly in a real place and time. Thus the story is neither fantasy, nor reality, but a combination of the two. The impulse behind magic realism is often attributed to several factors, including the superstition of Latin America's indigenous populations. In the case of Garcia Marquez, credit is also given to the influence of his maternal grandmother, a storyteller whose magical tales affected Garcia Marquez's imagination very early in life.

Allusion Allusion in literature occurs when an aspect in a story implies or makes an indirect reference to

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something outside of the story. Garcia Marquez is well-known for his ability to blend native South American legends with European myths and stories. Even in a story as short as "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' one can find allusions to the biblical story of Jonah (through the children's assumption that the form washing ashore is a beached whale), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (in which a shipwrecked man washes ashore in a country full of tiny people), and even the Greek god Zeus, whose sexual prowess highlights many Greek myths. More obvious allusions include the notion that Esteban connotes the ancient god Quetzalcoatl, who in Aztec myth emphasizes peacefulness and self-sacrifice when he comes from the sea. Like Esteban, Quetzalcoatl leaves via the sea, promising a return that leaves a lasting expectation in those he leaves behind. Esteban's name alludes to two historical figures: St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, whose name is the English translation of Esteban; and Estevanico, an African who explored parts of the New World in the 1500s. Garcia Marquez also makes an allusion to the Greek warrior Odysseus, whose adventures are chronicled in Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus's seafaring adventures include a voyage past the Sirens, whose irresistible singing could not be heard by any man without him abandoning his destination and turning toward them. The women's crying at Esteban's funeral has a similar effect: "Some sailors who heard the weeping from a distance went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens." The abundant allusions in the story suggest that the various cultures that Garcia Marquez refers to are more closely related than is often imagined. Every culture has its saints and its heroes; "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' demonstrates the process through which these figures become important in their respective cultures.

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together in society) with their Spanish conquerors. Consequently, much of the Colombian population consists of mestizos—people of both native Colombian and Spanish origin. A former part of the Spanish colonial empire named New Granada that gained its freedom from Spain in 1810, Colombia suffered from several civil wars throughout the nineteenth century. By the mid-1800s Liberals and Conservatives comprised the opposing political groups that would subject Colombia to frequent and bloody revolutions. Severe fighting reached its height between 1899 and 1903, a period known as the War of a Thousand Days. During this time there was a continuing separation between wealthy elite landowners, often of European descent, and freed slaves and indigenous populations whose lands had been confiscated and redistributed. Meanwhile, Colombia was struggling to grow its export trade, which consisted largely of coffee, petroleum, and bananas, under Conservative leadership.

Social Policies The Depression of the 1930s meant severe economic hardship for Colombia due to its growing dependence on exporting goods whose worth plummeted on the world market. The Conservative government in power at this time was replaced by Liberal president Alfonso Lopez, whose biggest reform was a move to redistribute land from wealthy landowners who were not using their land productively to peasant "squatters" who depended on their plots for subsistence. The Depression also meant an increase in domestic industry, since competition with imported goods was significantly reduced. Assisting Colombia's poorest residents has been an ongoing concern for Colombian government, particularly during Liberal administrations.

La Violencia

Historical Context Political Background During the period of European imperialism following Columbus's arrival in the New World, Colombia's indigenous tribes could offer little resistance to Spanish conquest. For the most part, these tribes amalgamated (intermarried and lived

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Opposition between the Liberal and Conservative parties in Colombia has been extremely hostile and violent. This confrontation escalated during the period between 1948 and 1962 known as La Violencia. Although initially sparked by the assassination of Liberal leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, much of the following fifteen years of fighting was caused by existing hostilities between the two parties. Some 200,000 people lost their lives in the fighting, much of which involved extreme acts of cruelty to the victims.

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Contrast 1940s: Garcia Marquez composes several short stories that blend realistic elements with the fantastic. This style, known as magic realism, becomes popular among Hispanic writers. 1990s: Como agua para chocolate, a magic realist novel by Mexican writer Laura Esquivel, is translated into English as Like Water for Chocolate. The novel becomes a best-seller and spawns a popular film version. Colombia, 1950s: Colombia is in the midst of La Violencia, a fifteen-year period of violence in which over 200,000 people are murdered. Colombia, 1990s: Cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar

La Violencia involved a wide spectrum of Colombians's concerns. Peasants who had improved their land under the 1930s land reform found that they were required to pay exorbitant legal fees to gain title in some areas of the country. Guerilla leaders, increasingly the sons of small farmers and merchants, were able to gain peasant support as they ambushed and retaliated against each other in longstanding feuds regarding family relationships, political party (which is inherited in Colombia), and government ties. Migrating groups of peasants looking for work in other areas joined the fray. The government abdicated control in many areas, leading to multiple bids for power by local groups in many towns and cities. It was during La Violencia that president Laureano Gomez, a Conservative, instituted a fascist government in an attempt to regain control. He was overthrown by the military and populist president General Gustave Rojas Pinilla, who in turn was driven from office by the military. Finally, the National Front, a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, arranged a truce. Garcia Marquez covered many of these events as a journalist before treating them in his fictional works. La Violencia has been one of the most fictionalized events in Colombia's history.

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Gavira turns himself in to Colombian authorities to avoid facing trial in the United States. The lucrative cocaine trade has resulted in hundreds of murders within the past years, including the assassinations of top officials. Colombia, 1950s: Colombia's largest exports are fishing, forestry, and petroleum products. Coffee is the number one cash crop. Colombia, today: Coffee continues to be the country's leading legal export. Millions work in the fields harvesting coffee beans for as little as $1.50 per day.

The 1960s Colombia continued its struggle for economic development in the 1960s; intervention by the United States increased Colombia's dependence on outside assistance, but did little to help the economy. The 1960s were a period of high unemployment, low coffee export prices, and economic stagnation. Under Conservative president Guillermo Leon Valencia, union workers received a forty percent wage increase and inflation skyrocketed. Deflationary pricing resulted in high unemployment. Government policy later improved, however, and by the late 1960s Colombia's economy was growing again. During this time, migration to the cities continued, and by 1970 over half of Columbia's population consisted of urban residents.

Colombia Today Because so much of Colombia's development was distributed unevenly, there remains a large gap between economic classes. Approximately 20 percent of Colombia's population lives below the poverty level, many of them in slums on the outskirts of Colombia's urban areas. Fear of military intervention in the government, violence, and acts of terrorism still exist. A large drug-trafficking problem continues to plague the nation as well. Nevertheless,

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the decades after La Violencia have seen Colombia become one of the most urbanized and modernized countries in Latin America.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and History Although little of Colombia's history makes its way into ' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," the history of Colombia is an important part of Garcia Marquez's work. The isolation of the village, the mythical sense of time portrayed, and the anonymity of the characters make the absence of history so obvious that one begins to question why Garcia Marquez has chosen deliberately to omit this information. This omission technique can be found in other works of magic realism as well. One explanation for its use, according to critics, is to protect the author, particularly if he or she is writing something controversial in countries where freedom of speech is curtailed by the government. By making the story "about" something other than one's own country, the writer can safely express controversial viewpoints. Another possibility is that Garcia Marquez avoids a specific history to make the characters and the action representative of all people, not just those of a particular place. Nevertheless, the kindness and love the villagers show to the drowned man, when read against the background of Colombian history, contrasts sharply with the violence and cruelty that belongs to much of Colombia's past.

Critical Overview Although Garcia Marquez wrote ' "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" several years before it and other short stories were published in English in 1972, most readers of English at that time knew only of his most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many early reviewers were somewhat disappointed in the sparse, short stories. They contained neither the grand historic sweep of One Hundred Years nor the complex character development that wins reader affection through increased familiarity. John Sturrock in the New York Times Book Review considered the stories "makeweights," "the ambitious but as yet uncertain and over-abstract tales of a writer too young to recognize that even the most imaginative fiction needs to be filled with things as well as strange thoughts." Some reviewers expressed distaste for the Garcia Marquez's style. John Leonard in the New York Times called them ' 'rather typical examples of postwar existen-

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tialist futzing around." Leonard went on to say that ' 'humor is not permitted in such fiction, nor rounded characters, society, politics, history." Not all reviewers shared these opinions. Some found much to admire in Garcia Marquez's short stories, including not only his unique style and his social agenda but also his insistence that fantastic things are real. Alfred Kazin, in the New York Times Book Review, described the pressures of literary achievement and social responsibility that keep Garcia Marquez on the artistic side of propaganda. Kazin saw ' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" as a manifestation of the author's vision of the natural world as a place of both myth and reality. Other critics found humor in the story, pointing out the naming of Esteban as an especially wry observation on human nature. Garcia Marquez has amassed a considerable reputation since translations of his work first appeared. With the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature to his credit, he has gained increased critical respect as well.' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' is no longer dismissed as ' 'A Story for Children"— as some subtitles refer to the story—though it certainly works on a literal level as a children's story. More recently, critics have begun to examine the larger implications of particular aspects of the story, including the naming of Esteban, the changes he brings to the village, and the character of the villagers themselves. In later criticism, the focus has been on Garcia Marquez's particular narrative techniques rather than the plot of the story itself. Kathleen McNerney discussed Garcia Marquez's characteristically shifting point of view in Understanding Garcia Marquez. Often within the same paragraph, McNerney purported, readers receive not only the villagers's point of view, but they also see Esteban through the eyes of a hostess and as Esteban sees himself, abashed and ashamed in the tiny homes of his neighbors. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Raymond Williams examined the role of the reader in the story. Not only can readers find humor in their assumed superiority over the odd, superstitious villagers, but the notion of imagination becomes prevalent as well because, just as the villagers analyze the drowned man, readers analyze the villagers. Readers cannot accept the story as real, but it still exists, just as the inexplicable dead man cannot be ignored by the villagers. In that acceptance comes an understanding of the limitless imagination. Esteban's appearance changes the town, said Marta Frosch in

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a Books Abroad article, but only because the town has recreated him as a human being whose abilities and shortcomings are imagined for him. Critics have cited similarities between Garcia Marquez's work and that of a number of acclaimed twentieth-century writers in an attempt to locate possible influences. "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' has been compared by many to the work of Franz Kafka, which contains a similar sparse quality of unreality. Ernest Hemingway is also known for providing spare details that carry more weight than they appear to at first. Like Garcia Marquez, William Faulkner has memorialized his place of residence in his literary works. Perhaps the largest influence on Garcia Marquez, however, is the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, whose 1949 novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) influenced many of Latin America's magic realist writers. Nevertheless, Garcia Marquez retains his own narrative style, and his own approach to reality. His work asks the reader to examine his or her beliefs and morals, to understand the choices of others, and to learn from the experience.

Criticism Rena Korb Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses Marquez's use of magic realism in "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World." When Gabriel Garcia Marquez published his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, both the author and the writing technique he used, magic realism, were catapulted into the international spotlight. Magic realism (the term was first used in 1925 by a German art critic, and about twenty-five years later, it was rediscovered by a Caribbean writer) explores the overlap between fantasy and reality and thus reveals the mysterious elements hidden in day-to-day life. As a literary style, it was born in Latin America where writers such as Garcia Marquez, who were raised hearing tales of mystical folklore, were open to viewing the world through a more imaginative, less rigid lens than "realistic" writers. Magic realism creates a different type of background for the events of the day to play themselves out against, one in which the inhabitants are accept-

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ing of extraordinary occurrences and thus forge amongst themselves a new set of shared beliefs. Combining elements of the fantastic and magical, the mythic, the imaginative, and the religious, magic realism expands human perceptions of reality. Much of the power of magic realism derives from the way it blends the fantastic and the everyday by depicting incredible events, supporting them with realistic details, and chronicling everything in a matter-of-fact tone. According to Morton P. Levitt in "The Meticulous Modernist Fictions of Garcia Marquez," Garcia Marquez, who was a journalist, says that his style derives from his grandmother, who ' 'told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness." Garcia Marquez grew up in a small town that had little to offer except for a sense of the past, according to Levitt: "like so many Latin American towns [it] lived on remembrances, myth, solitude and nostalgia." Garcia Marquez presents this multiple reality in his stories; one reality is that of the fantastic, but another reality is the author's (and the reader's) complete acceptance of the fantastic. Garcia Marquez's use of tone shows the events he narrates to be credible—things that could happen at any time. The fantastic becomes utterly natural. In addition to One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez's short story "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' highlights his talents at using magic realism to draw the reader into a world unlike one in which most people dwell. Since its first publication in a collection of short stories in 1972, the work has won attention and drawn praise from critics based far from Garcia Marquez's native Colombia, including reviewers for Time and John Updike writing for The New Yorker. Alfred Kazin, in a review of Leaf Storm and Other Stories in Critical Essays on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, refers to ' 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World'' as one of the author's "beautiful early stories" in which his vision "expresses itself with perfect charm," and V.S. Pritchett notes in New Statesman that the story "easily leaps into the comical and exuberant." In the story, Garcia Marquez presents a tiny coastal town filled with people who seem unremarkable in any way except in their ability to accept the fantastic and thus enrich their own lives. At the story's beginning, the emptiness of the villagers's lives can be seen in their surroundings. The town is built on a stony cliff upon which nothing grows.

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What Do I Read Next? "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is another story by Garcia Marquez that features a stranger's arrival in a seaside village. One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa in 1970, is Garcia Marquez's landmark magic realism novel about a marvelous village, Macondo, and its equally wondrous founding family.

Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel, Gulliver's Travels, is the story of a man washed ashore on foreign lands. The reception Gulliver receives in this satirical comment on human nature is quite different from the love given to Esteban in Garcia Marquez's story,

One of the most important influences on Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier's 1949 novel, The Kingdom of this World, is a magic realist look at

The Old Man and the Sea, written in 1952 by Ernest Hemingway, is a classic story of human nature explored through the metaphor of fishing.

Their homes, which are spread out on a "desertlike cape," have "stone courtyards with no flowers." The villagers have very little space in which to cultivate themselves. Even the dead must be tossed out, over the side of the cliffs.

touched by Esteban, in the mothers's fears that' 'the wind would carry off their children." Their calm acceptance of the phenomenal, however, is most clearly apparent when they regard Esteban. He weighs almost as much as a horse ' 'and they said to each other that maybe . . . the water had gotten into his bones." He hardly fits inside the house, and "they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men." These comments on the nature of his size are not rationalizations; the villagers are not bothered by his size, they simply do not need to explain his physical state. Their comments are spoken as asides, noting unimportant yet interesting details.

Because the villagers naturally accept the fantastic, an enormous drowned man who washes upon their shore does not frighten them nor do they reject him. Instead of being freakish for his size, he is ' 'the tallest, strongest, most virile and best built man they had ever seen." The drowned man, whom they come to call Esteban, has more ideal qualities than just the physical. He is compassionate, recognizing the anxiety that his size causes and possessing the awful knowledge that "the lady of the house looked for her most resistant chair and begged him, frightened to death, sit here." He feels shame at being such a bother to the villagers; had he known he was going to drown, ' 'he would have looked for a more discreet place." While others might have turned on him for his unusual characteristics, the villagers not only show him kindness but actually embrace him. He becomes their model and they will better their village and their lives in his honor. The villagers live in a land where mystical things can happen and where intuition and magic count for more than strict reality. Their partiality for the imaginative is apparent even before they are

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Because the villagers do not spend their time wondering how Esteban came to exist, they can concentrate on what is important: the man. Looking in his face they see that' 'he did not have the lonely look of other drowned men who came out of the sea or that haggard, needy look of men who drowned in rivers." When they realize that he will have to be dragged to his funeral (no one can carry him), they understand the shame and awkwardness his size caused him in life. Not only do they understand how Esteban feels, but they begin to understand a bit more about their own lives. As the women sit up all night, sewing an outfit for Esteban,' 'it seemed to them that the wind had never been so steady nor the sea so restless... and they supposed that the change

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had something to do with the dead man." Already their lives, fed by the "calm and bountiful" sea, are changing. The lives of the villagers will continue to change over the next twenty-four hours and on into the future. To honor Esteban's memory, the villagers will build larger homes so that he can pass through freely without shame at his size. They will paint the houses bright colors and ' 'break their backs digging for springs among the stones and planting flowers on the cliffs." In the future, passengers on great oceanliners will smell the villagers's gardens and be told "that's Esteban's village." What Esteban's visit has made them realize is how terribly empty their lives had been. Though they knew that "they were no longer present, that they would never be," by making their home a place good enough for Esteban, they are enriching themselves as well. The use of another element of magic realism helps justify the monumental effect Esteban had: the mythic. In the personage of Esteban are shades of heroes from different cultures and time periods. His very name, Spanish for Stephen, invokes St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Esteban also may recall Estevanico (a diminutive form of the name), an African slave who explored Florida and the Southwest United States in the 1500s. He was the first African many Indians had ever seen, and they thought he might be a god and gave him many gifts. As with Esteban, his appearance led him to be revered as something more than an ordinary man; just as the villagers would strive "to make Esteban's memory eternal," legends were passed down for generations, right until the present day, about Estevanico. Esteban also unites the village and himself through a connection to different myths and mythical figures. The village women become as powerful as figures of Greek mythology when "sailors who heard [their] weeping . . . went off course and people heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient fables about sirens." This allusion to Homer's Odyssey also brings to mind that epic's hero, Odysseus, who, during his ten-year voyage, washed up on the shore of several islands and effected sometimes radical changes on their inhabitants. Esteban is also tied to the ancient Aztec god Quetzalcoatl who arrived from the sea. He had a civilizing effect on the Aztec people, leading them from the sacrifice of others to selfsacrifice in order to achieve their goals. Because of his close tie with the sea, his statue in the Aztec

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In the personage of Esteban are shades of heroes from different cultures and time periods."

capital showed him covered in snail shells and flowers, much like Esteban, who washed up on shore "covered with a crust of mud and scales." The defeated Quetzalcoatl left his people, again by the sea, but according to legend he returns periodically to bring about change and revolution. Esteban could very well be the villagers's personal Quetzalcoatl. If all these references need to be interpreted in order to understand the story, what then is to be made of the subtitle ("A Tale for Children'') which sometimes accompanies the story? Perhaps it is not really necessary to know how the story works, only that it does work. It can exist as a fairy tale without drawing criticism for its lack of reality. As a children's story, it is allowed to simply entertain. The story may best be seen as presenting the multiple realities that are inherent to magic realism. Just as the villagers have to be open to possibilities in order to reap the benefits of Esteban's visit, so must readers suspend their disbelief. Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Gene H. Bell-Villada Bell-Villada is an educator, critic, and biographer. In the following essay, he discusses Garcia Marquez's short fiction, including "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,'' which he calls a ' 'folklore science-fiction.'' Had Garcia Marquez never put any of his novels to paper, his shorter fiction would have still gained him some niche in literary history. Already in 1967 the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti was to observe that "some of the stories gathered in Big Mama's Funeral can be considered among the most perfect instances of the genre ever written in Latin America." We might venture yet further and say that those pieces, along with the novella No One Writes to the Colonel and the stories collected in

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Garcia Marquez the socialist well knows that the imagination and its dreams are as crucial a force in political life as is economic fact,"

Innocent Erendira, put Garcia Marquez in the company of such acknowledged masters of short fiction as [Anton] Chekhov, [Thomas] Mann, [James] Joyce, [John] Cheever, or Grace Paley. The author cites [Ernest] Hemingway as the chief influence on his own story writing. The admission is borne out by the pieces themselves, with their spare, minimal prose that captures life's little disturbances and moments of solitude, evokes major emotion in a snatch of dialogue or in the slightest of gestures. Garcia Marquez remarked in 1950 that "the North Americans . . . are writing today's best short stories," and Hemingway in this regard served him as much as mentor as did [William] Faulkner and [Virginia] Woolf for his longer works. Particularly influential was Hemingway's "iceberg" theory of the short story—often cited by Garcia Marquez—whereby the author makes visible only one-seventh of what is to be communicated, the other six-sevenths lying implicitly beneath the narrative's surface. The stories offer pleasures of a sort different from those we know from One Hundred Years of Solitude. They are miracles not of mythic sweep but of understatement, conjuring up as they do the subtle, small-scale, mostly interpersonal upsets and triumphs of common village folk—the sleepy priests, pool-hall souses, provincial wheeler-dealers, troubled but stouthearted women, and the abandoned, the mismatched, or the bereaved. In later pieces, Garcia Marquez will emerge with his visionary side full-grown and include fantastical materials—a wizened angel or a ghost ship. But there is a key element never absent from the Colombian author's stories, be they "magical" or realistic: the climate of his world. Every one of these short pieces has at least a reference either to the intense daytime heat or the tropical rain and its effects on characters' lives

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(their slowness in midafternoon, their ill health in rainy season). The consummate craft of the narratives should also be noted: Garcia Marquez typically spends weeks or even months on a single short story, feeling pleased when completing just two lines in a d a y . . . . In "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,'' the only entity with a name is the eponymous cadaver, whom the villagers choose to call ' 'Esteban." (The Catholic church's first martyr, we may recall, was St. Stephen.) When his tall, strong, broad-shouldered, lifeless body is washed ashore near a seafaring hamlet of "twenty-odd houses," the irruption from another, remote, unknown world excites the romantic, myth-producing imaginations of the sad and isolated townsfolk. He strikes them as proud, "the most virile and best-built man they had ever seen," and from there they infer for him the power to stop the winds and call fish from the sea. The women in particular fantasize about him, alive and polite as a fellow villager in their lives, and inasmuch as it is they who prepare his corpse for sea burial, they grow particularly attached to their ideas and images of him. The males by contrast get to feeling jealous and look forward to his being returned at last to the deep. If the women's collective role in this story shows mythmaking's more specifically erotic side, in the ritual ocean burial the affective bonds are extended and "all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen." Hints at Odysseus's adventure of the sirens help place the incident of Esteban within a larger ancestral continuum of seafaring fable. Through these intimations of a greater and more beautiful cosmos the villagers are reminded of "the desolation of their streets" and (by extension) of their lives. And so we probably can trust the omniscient narrator's prediction that the inhabitants, in response, will thence beautify and make fertile their hamlet, and give it some fame as "Esteban's village." In some of his best long narratives Garcia Marquez forged a kind of fantastical history; here we see him experimenting in turn with a fantastical anthropology, as it were, a "folklore science-fiction" that speculates on the humbler origins and organizational powers of a commonly created and shared popular myth. Garcfa Marquez the socialist well knows that the imagination and its dreams are as crucial a force in political life as is economic fact. Source: Gene H. Bell-Villada, "The Master of Short Forms," in his Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 119-36.

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Mary E. Davis In the following excerpted essay, Davis talks about the environment of some of Garcia Marquez 's short stories, and how he uses ' 'a heroic figure to revolutionize mundane reality.'' Since the publication in 1972 of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' penultimate collection of short stories [Leaf Storm and Other Stories], critics have been hard pressed to analyze the enigmatic, fabulous tales that make up the group. Several stories are developed from the tension between the sea and the land, the latter almost always being a boring place inhabited by citizens of limited imagination. In several cases, unusual apparitions from the sea provoke traumatic explosions of imagination in one or many of the inhabitants of an otherwise staid region. . . . As a whole, the stories create a fabulous environment, and the Caribbean becomes as prodigious a sea as the Mediterranean was for Homer. Gradually the land areas around it become permeated with beings from other times and other civilizations. The original inhabitants are disturbed by the heroic characters, and at the end of the story, nothing is as it was before. Forced to see themselves and their world as they are, some natives seize the opportunity to change, so that their world begins to adjust itself to the heroic demands of the travelers from other realms. One of the most enigmatic stories in the collection, ' 'El ahogado mas hermoso del mundo'' [' 'The Handsomest Man in the World"], illustrates the manner in which Garcia Marquez utilizes a heroic figure to revolutionize mundane reality. To achieve the appropriate reaction from the reader to the disparate elements in the story, Garcia M&rquez creates a constant tension between a small fishing village and the sea which borders it. The tension heightens as the story progresses, and it remains unresolved at the open-ended conclusion. The meaning of the story must be developed in the mind of the reader, for it is not readily apparent from the various elements of the plot. As the story progresses, both the nature of the village and that of the drowned man who washes up on a nearby beach are gradually revealed. The village is small, and its few inhabitants live in houses rapidly constructed of boards. In this village devoid of beauty, patios are filled with rocks rather than with flowers. The physical poverty of the village functions as an objective correlative of the

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A constant feature of Garcia Marquez' style has been his fusion of Greek, Spanish, and American literary models and mythology."

capacity of soul of its natives. There is hope, however, for the village does contain children, who welcome the drowned man to their village as one of their own. As the drowned man first appears, floating in the sea, the children on the beach pretend that he might be an enemy ship or a whale. When at last he washes ashore, he turns out to be a dead man, all covered with marine animals and residue from shipwrecks. The children play "funeral" with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand, then digging him up again. Eventually an adult notices their unusual toy, gives a shout of alarm, and the men carry the drowned man to the nearest house. The men react quite differently to the dead man. Although they do not doubt he is a man, they refuse to accept him as one of them. Worried that he may be from their village, they look from man to man and realize that they are complete. The rest of the story illustrates how ironic is Garcia Marquez' use of "complete" in this village. The men do notice the Homeric size of the stranger. He is heavy as a horse and will not fit into any house in the village. Leaving the body sprawled on the beach, the men leave to investigate his identity in nearby villages. The women clean the body and, as they see the face for the first time, they are, literally, breathless. The drowned man is the most perfect being they have ever seen, and their poor imagination cannot accommodate him. They proceed, in a scene reminding the reader of the remotest, matriarchal period of man's past, to surround him in a circle on the beach. As the usually calm sea roars and seems anxious, the women sew clumsy garments for the drowned man. Fantasizing about his sexual prowess, the women indulge in a series of mental voyages: "Andaban extraviadas por esos dedalos de fantasia...."

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Since the women have exercised their imagination rarely in the past, they must proceed from the known (their village) to the miraculous (the drowned man's effect on the village). They imagine how their village would have to become if a being as fabulous as the ahogado were to live there. They compare their boring lives with husbands who fish every night to the spectacular possibilities provided by such a splendid man ("el mejor armado que habian visto jamas"). The drowned man would have magical powers to call fish from the water, cause water to gush from rocks, and to plant flowers even in a rock wall. Not content with an anonymous dead man, the women name him Stephen. After he has been dressed, curiously enough, as a huge baby, and given a martyr's name, the sea calms, as though satisfied. The women take their second mental voyage, speculating about the personality of Stephen. Because of his size, he would have been uncomfortable in their village. The women realize how innately hostile the group is to anything different, and they fear he would have been considered ' 'el bobo grande'' or "el tonto hermoso." By this time Stephen has assumed so much personality that he hardly seems dead, and the women cover his face so that the rising sun will not bother him. Returning from a frustrating night, the men do not understand the fascination of the huge body for their wives. They jealously fear comparison with him and only want to throw him back into the sea with an anchor tied to his ankles. After they see Stephen's face, however, his beauty convinces them of the sincerity of his manner of being (which Garcia Marquez ironically twists into ' 'modo deestar.") The funeral rites for Stephen are resplendent with flowers. The village elects honorary parents and other relatives for Stephen, so that through this ritual everyone is now related to everyone else. After his body is returned to the sea, Stephen's memory causes the village to rebuild houses, plant roses, and paint with bright colors. Even more important, the villagers now realize that they are incomplete and always will be. The faculty of soul which they had so dreadfully lacked has begun to develop, however, and imagination, stimulated by so powerful a trauma as Stephen's visit, can hardly be prevented from expanding.... The women attribute to the giant the personality of dignified arrogance, a characteristic which reminds one of Zeus and almost all the Greek

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heroes. The highly charged eroticism provoked by Stephen's size is also reminiscent of the amorous adventures of Zeus, as well as of the sexual trials of Odysseus. The women's thoughts revolve around the Homeric size of Stephen's (hypothetical) bed, and Garcia Marquez slyly directs the reader's memory back to the close of the Odyssey, as Penelope uses the characteristics of Odysseus' bed to ascertain the identity of the stranger who claims to be her husband.... Stephen's godlike qualities are constantly reinforced by his relationship to the sea. The Caribbean usually is calm in the area of the village, but on the Tuesday night the women spend sewing around Stephen on the beach, they notice that the sea had never seemed so distressed. The empathy between Stephen and the anxious sea becomes prophetic. Stephen is a product of the sea, whether he is a man or a god, and the sea that produced him will receive him again. The cyclical nature of this relationship reveals itself in Stephen's strange clothes. The women find it difficult to construct clothing large enough for the giant, so that his apparel is amazingly like that of a baby (a' 'sietemesino''). It is as if the brief period in the village provides Stephen with a chance to reincarnate himself before he returns to the sea for another voyage.... The funeral ceremony provides Garcia Marquez with the last ritual in the story. The flowers and the wailing of the women give a peculiarly primitive aspect to the funeral, reiterating that grandness within simplicity that marks Beowulf's funeral and the many leave-takings in the Iliad. The storyteller ironically twists the llanto into an alluring melody, as he relates that''Algunos marineros que oyeron el llanto a la distancia perdieron la certeza del rumbo, y se supo de uno que se hizo amarrar al palo mayor, recordando antiguas fabulas de sirenas." This last allusion connects Stephen's funeral to Odysseus' trial with Circe and, simultaneously, suggests the power of art to transform reality, to create beauty from sadness. A constant feature of Garcia Marquez' style has been his fusion of Greek, Spanish, and American literary models and mythology. The most exotic aspects of Stephen's visit to the village correlate with the widely disseminated myth of Quetzalcoatl, the pre-Columbian god worshiped by several tribes of Central America and Mexico. Like Stephen, Quetzalcoatl arrived from the sea and brought a new civilizing influence upon the various forms of cul-

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ture which he encountered. A new vision of beauty, of human relationships, and of time itself derived from Quetzalcoatl's emphasis upon self-sacrifice rather than the commonly accepted sacrifice of others. Indigenous resistance to Quetzalcoatl's revolutionary influence took the form of a magician, who, in the course of his epic struggle against the peaceful god, was able to make dead bodies incredibly heavy. Stephen, it will be remembered, seemed impossibly heavy to the men who carried his body from the shore. Within Aztec mythology, Quetzalcoatl is at times called Ehecatl, the lord of the wind; it is therefore not surprising that the wind should rage and the sea be troubled on the night of Stephen's appearance. . .. In his combination of Homeric and modern aspects of Odysseus' personality with pre-Columbian heroic constructs, Garcia Marquez creates still another embodiment of the archetype of man's refusal to accept reality as it is. His villagers, incited by a lively dead man, completely change from within, and their new self is reflected in their village, famous for the legend of Stephen, the martyr whose death stimulates new life. Source: Mary E. Davis, "The Voyage Beyond the Map: 'El Ahogado Mas Hermoso Del Mundo,' " in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1979, pp. 25-33.

Sources Frosch, Marta Morello. "The Common Wonders of Garcia Marquez's Recent Fiction," Books Abroad, Vol. 47, No. 3, 1973, pp. 496-501. Kazin, Alfred. Review in The New York Times Book Review, February 20, 1972, pp. 1, 14, 16. Kazin, Alfred. Review of Leaf Storm and Other Stories, in Critical Essays on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, edited by George R. McMurray, G. K. Hall & Co., 1987, pp. 26-29. McNerney, Kathleen. Understanding Garcia Marquez, University of South Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 121-2. Pritchett, V. S. "A Ruined Arcady: 'Leaf Storm and Other Stories,'"New Statesman, February 9, 1973, p. 200.

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Sturrock, John. "Shorter Marquez," The New York Times Book Review, July 16, 1978, p. 3. Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Twayne Publishers, 1984, pp. 96-8.

Further Reading Byk, John. "From Fact to Fiction: Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Short Story," in Mid-American Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, 1986, pp. 111-16. Discusses the progression of Garcia Marquez's short stories from his early, traditional style, to his later, fully developed style of magical realism. The Cambridge History of Latin America, Volume III, edited by Leslie Bethel, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Covers the history of Latin America since 1930 from a political and economic perspective. Epstein, Joseph. "How Good is Gabriel Garcia Marquez?," in Commentary, May, 1983, pp. 59-65. Epstein calls ' The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" "charming" and admires the writer's considerable talent for making readers see things in novel ways. Levitt, Morton P. "From Realism to Magic Realism: The Meticulous Modernist Fictions of Garcia Marquez," in Gabriel Garcia Marquez, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1989, pp. 227-42. Levitt discusses magic realism as a literary technique, provides examples of it in Garcia Marquez's work, and shows Garcia Marquez's relationship to it through quotations from the author. McMurray, George R. Introduction to Critical Essays on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, edited by George R. McMurray, G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 1-23. McMurray discusses the history of Garcia Marquez's publications and gives an overview of critical reception to his work. Review in The Times Literary Supplement, September 29, 1927, p. 1140. The reviewer finds Garcia Marquez a "storyteller" rather than a "short-story writer," and goes on to discuss the peculiarity of his fantastic approach to drab reality.

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Tillie Olsen's story "I Stand Here Ironing" recounts a poor working woman's ambivalence about her parenting skills and her eldest daughter's future. Published in Olsen's first collection of stories, Tell Me a Riddle, in 1961, this first-person story contains many autobiographical elements. Central to the plot is the metaphor of a mother ironing her daughter's dress as she mentally attempts to ' 'iron'' out her uneasy relationship with her daughter through a stream-of-consciousness monologue. The narrator, a middle-aged mother of five, as Olsen was when she wrote the story, is the type of woman whose story was seldom heard at that time: that of a working-class mother who must hold down a job and care for children at the same time. "Her father left me before she was a year old,'' the mother says, a circumstance that mirrored Olsen's predicament as a young mother. The story was heralded by the emerging women's movement of the early 1960s as an example of the difficulty of some women's lives and as a portrayal of the self-doubt many mothers suffer when they know their children are not receiving all the attention they deserve. Love or longing is not enough, Olsen says; everything must be weighed against forces that are beyond one's control. Though the story is not overtly political, it presents the type of economic condition that inspired Olsen to become active in left-wing labor causes at a young age.' 'I Stand Here Ironing," an unromantic portrait of motherhood, is perhaps the most frequently anthologized of Olsen's stories.

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Author Biography Tillie Olsen was born in 1913 in Omaha, Nebraska, to Russian Jewish immigrants whose political activities had forced them to leave their homeland in 1905. During her childhood, Olsen's father was the state secretary of the Socialist Party, and she likewise became politically active at an early age by joining the Young Communist League. After high school, she worked menial jobs until she was jailed in Kansas City for attempting to organize packinghouse workers into a union. By 1933, Olsen had moved to California where she resumed her union activities and began writing articles for left-wing publications. She had one daughter from her first marriage to a man who promptly abandoned his young family. In 1936 she married Jack Olsen and spent the next twenty years raising three daughters while working full time as a factory worker and a secretary. Most of her short fiction dates to the 1950s, when her youngest child entered school and she was awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. Critical acclaim followed the publication of Tell Me a Riddle in 1961, the same year the title story won the O. Henry Award for best short story. The works in the collection revolve around a central theme: how external forces undermine the ambitions of individuals. For example, in "I Stand Here Ironing'' a mother laments the fact that her young daughter's creative talent will be squandered because of the family's limited income. The awardwinning title story, "Tell Me a Riddle," concerns David and Eva, a Jewish immigrant couple married for forty-seven years, and the compromises and disappointments Eva has endured to satisfy her family. The book quickly became a favorite among participants in the fledgling women's movement. Olsen's only novel, Yonnondio, was published in 1974, though it takes place in the 1930s. The novel is narrated by six-year-old Mazie Holbrook who tells of the harsh life of her impoverished family. The socialist concepts of the exploited proletariat and capitalism's damaging effects on family life are prominent in the novel, echoing the author's lifelong activism in leftist causes. In 1978, Olsen published a book called Silences which contains two long essays; one on the silenced voices of women writers, the other concerning how writers confront periods of silence in their own lives. Though the book received less attention than

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Olsen's fiction, it augments the small body of work for which she has received much praise. Olsen has lectured at many universities, including the University of California at Los Angeles, and has served as writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to receiving several honorary degrees, her stories, including "I Stand Here Ironing," have appeared in more than one hundred anthologies.

Plot Summary Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" is a monologue, a speech delivered by a narrator with whom the reader comes to identify. In the first few lines the narrator explains what she is doing—ironing—and what she is responding to—a request that she meet with a school official about her daughter, now nineteen years old. The occasion prompts her to recall her daughter's childhood and the effect she had on the girl as her mother. All the while she continues to iron, drawing parallels for herself and the reader between telling the story and ironing the wrinkles from a dress. At the outset the mother confesses her powerlessness over her daughter, asking "You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key?" She is worried that if she is asked to recall those early days of parenting she ' 'will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped." Despite these fears, the mother begins at the beginning: "She was a beautiful baby." Gradually the mother reveals the details of her daughter Emily's childhood, and a pattern of poverty and abandonment emerges. She was only nineteen herself when Emily was born. Her husband abandoned her, and she had no access to welfare or other services. Eventually she was forced to "bring her to [the father's] family and leave her." Emily was two years old before her mother could afford to come and pick her up. The little girl dutifully attended nursery school with ' 'never a direct protest, never rebellion." As she recollects these days, the mother wonders about the long term effects of that kind of obedience: ' 'what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?''

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and had entered the talent show and had won: ' 'suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity." This memory returns the narrator to the beginning of her train of thought. What is she supposed to do with a talent like that, "the control, the command, the convulsing and deadly clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this rare and precious laughter out of their lives"? Emily herself interrupts her mother's thoughts at this point, dismissing her mother's anxieties with a quick kiss and teasing her for spending so much time ironing. Emily has no concern for the future, especially tomorrow's exams. Her mother, however, has ' 'been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful," she "cannot endure it."

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The narrator recalls how different Emily was from her siblings; she did not smile or laugh easily. The narrator had loved her as much as the others but had not yet learned to show it. Even with a "new daddy" the somber child's troubles were not over. She developed a terrible case of measles that isolated her from her mother and siblings and caused her to be sent to a convalescent home in the country. She did not get better; instead she became even thinner and sadder. The mother vividly recalls the scene during their brief visits: ' 'The parents stand below shrieking up to be heard, and between them the invisible wall: 'Not to be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection.'" After eight months of convalescence, Emily returned home thin, frail, and resistant to physical affection. Her adolescence provided little relief. Her mother remembers her as ' 'thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every girl was supposed to look or thought she should look like a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple. "But one day in the midst of' 'that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy," Emily called her mother from school, weeping with joy and fear. She had taken her mother's advice

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Finally, Emily's mother takes stock of Emily's life and confesses ' 'I will never total it all." But she does total it all, reducing her rambling monologue to one terse paragraph. Finally she decides on a course of action: "let her be," and adds only the hope that Emily will come to know "that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." In other words, that she is more than the sum of her experiences.

Characters Emily Nineteen-year-old Emily is the eldest child of the narrator. Her mother regrets much about Emily's upbringing, saying: ' 'She was a child seldom smiled at." Her father deserted the family less than a year after her birth, during the worst of the Depression. While her mother struggled to make ends meet, young Emily was handed over to a variety of temporary caretakers. As young girl, Emily was considered homely—"thin and dark and foreignlooking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple''—and she became shy and passive. After her mother's second marriage, Emily was eclipsed by her younger, more selfassured half-sister Susan. To her mother's surprise, Emily has developed a talent for comedic acting—a "deadly clowning"—which wins her an audience, but she seems to lack motivation. At the end of the story, Emily chooses to sleep through her exams and quips that "in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit." Though her

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mother is convinced that "all that is in her will not bloom,'' she expresses hope that Emily may nevertheless know ' 'that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."

Narrator The narrator in "I Stand Here Ironing'' is never described physically nor referred to by name. Her identity is revealed through the explanation she gives of her relationship with her eldest daughter, Emily. The narrator has endured a great deal of hardship in her life. She was deserted at age nineteen by her first husband, less than a year after Emily's birth, during the worst of the Depression. Money has always been short, and the necessity of working long hours made it impossible for her to be sufficiently attentive to her daughter. She remarried and had more children, to whom she feels she has been a better mother. She seems to regret much about how her first daughter was raised and feels that, as a result of her shortcomings as a mother, "all that is in [Emily] will not bloom." Readers have had varying reactions to the narrator's final resolution about her daughter—to "let her be." While some see passive resignation in this statement, others see it in a more positive light as an acknowledgement of her daughter's independence and ability to "find her own way."

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Topics for Further Study Olsen has a long history of political activism, and she was once jailed for trying to organize blue-collar workers to join a union. Explain how "I Stand Here Ironing" echoes Olsen's leftist politics, even though it contains no overt political statements. What do you think Olsen believes is a more important influence in a person's life—the role of nature, or the role of nurture? Give some examples of Emily's character traits that her mother thinks are due to nature and some she believes are due to nurture. Many psychologists believe that birth order influences personality. Research this idea and find out what some studies have found to be common traits among firstborn children. How is Emily's behavior representative of oldest children, and how is it different?

Susan Susan is Emily's younger half-sister. According to their mother, Susan is a better student than Emily, as well as better looking and more popular: Emily's "younger sister seemed all that she was not." Emily is competitive with Susan and feels slighted when their mother is more attentive to Susan. The mother feels that because Susan was raised in a more nurturing environment than Emily, it was inevitable that Susan would outshine her older half-sister.

Themes In Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," an unnamed narrator reflects on her somewhat distant relationship with her eldest daughter. It is a story about the search—by both mother and daughter—for individual identity despite the limitations imposed by a history of poverty and other social constraints. While it examines the difficulties a mother and daughter have in finding identities separate from

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one another and independent from social expectations about women, it raises questions about the nature of intimacy itself.

The Search for Identity The issue of the boundary between the individual identities of the mother and daughter is raised early in the story. The narrator seems disturbed by the idea of being asked to help someone understand her daughter:' 'You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me." Yet, even as the narrator questions "what good" her insights into her daughter are, she also lays claim to a special knowledge of her daughter, more complete than that of any hypothetical questioner: ' 'You did not know her all those years she was considered homely." The story presents the identities of both mother and daughter as incomplete, still in the process of ' 'becoming." The adolescent daughter is still strug-

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gling to find independence, and her guilt-ridden mother is still working through her assessment of her role. The shy daughter appears to have talent as an actress, much to the surprise of her mother who is prompted to wonder,' 'Was this Emily?'' The daughter becomes "Somebody," it seems, by pretending on stage to be someone else. Yet, even in the apparent freedom Emily achieves through acting, she is still "imprisoned" by the public nature of acting and by the people in her audience whose applause "wouldn't let [her] go." Her mother feels at a loss for how to nurture this talent in her daughter, and readers are left wondering whether Emily's gift will end up being left unexpressed— "clogged and clotted" inside of her. The mother's desire to define herself also seems unfulfilled in the end. She concludes that the task of "dredging the past" and sifting through "all that compounds a human being'' is too much for her. Convinced that she will never be able to "total it all," she resolves not to heed the request that she "come in and talk" to the school official. Her thoughts about her daughter and about her own role as a mother remain private, communicated only to the reader.

Limitations and Opportunities A deep sense of deprivation pervades ' 'I Stand Here Ironing." The mother describes numerous limitations she has had to confront: poverty, abandonment by her first husband, housework, and motherhood itself. The many hardships in her life seem to compound one another and even impair her ability to tell the story: ' 'And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again." The limited resources of the mother limit the daughter as well. The mother feels helpless to encourage her daughter's budding talent as an actress. The mother seems to blame her own youth and distractedness for the fact that' 'little will come'' of her daughter's potential.

Apathy Both daughter and mother appear to be apathetic at the end of the story: the daughter toward her future, the mother toward her own perceived failures. The daughter decides to sleep late despite having exams the next morning because "in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit." The mother, exhausted from ' 'dredging the past," resolves to "[l]et her be." Yet the story also presents evidence that there is at least

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a desire to overcome this apathy. The image of the mother's iron, which frames the story, provides an interesting emblem of this desire. In the first sentence, the iron, along with the narrator's thoughts, "moves tormented back and forth." In the last sentence, she articulates her hope that her daughter will be able to break free and learn ' 'that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."

Style Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" tells the story of a mother's relationship with her eldest daughter in a stark and dramatic fashion that has impressed critics and fellow writers with its originality and accessibility. The story is told entirely in the voice of the mother, but nonetheless manages to convey a dynamic relationship between two believable characters without resorting to cliche and sentimentality.

Structure and Point of View The story is told through the interior monologue of an unnamed mother as she irons her daughter Emily's dress. The catalyst for the monologue appears to be a request from an unspecified source, perhaps a school guidance counselor, for help in understanding the narrator's troubled daughter. The monologue consists of the narrator's fantasies, presented in a stream-of-consciousness manner, about what she might say in response to such a request. Such a narrative structure not only provides a dramatic context to draw the reader's attention, but it also serves to quickly establish the story's confrontational tone and introduce the narrator's repressed, frustrated character. Olsen's challenge is announced in the very first sentence, with the unusual appearance of the second person pronoun: "what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." The narrator begins questioning the validity of her own perspective on her daughter's psyche early in the story and wonders whether what she has to say "matters or ... explains anything." In addition to the insights the narrator shares with readers directly, her character is also revealed indirectly through the occasional interruptions of her monologue, which are caused by pressing demands from her daily life: ' 'Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him." In the end, the central

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paradox in the character of the narrator is also illustrated through the story's dramatic narrative "frame": she in fact has many insights into herself and her daughter, but she chooses not to express them either to her daughter or to whomever asked her to "come in and talk."

Language and Imagery In "I Stand Here Ironing," Olsen attempts to portray experiences and characters not typically given expression in literature. Perhaps her most admirable technical accomplishments lie in her ability to use language and imagery to believably portray the voice and thoughts of an intelligent but overburdened mother. Olsen intersperses the story with run-on sentences and expressive coinages, such as "I think of our others in their three- and four-year oldness." These techniques evoke the difficulty the narrator has answering unanswerable questions and imposing order upon the chaos that has been her daily life. Simple images from the world familiar to the narrator are used to express complex emotions. The most notable of these is the act of ironing referred to in the story's title. Associated with the social role of women, ironing—a back-and-forth motion that results in the elimination of wrinkles—becomes a symbol for the imperfections and frustrated desires of the narrator. One passage suggests that this also represents a less sentimental and more realistic image of motherhood: Emily muses that if she were to paint her mother's portrait, the pose Whistler had used in painting his mother's portrait—seated in a chair—wouldn't do. "I'd have to paint mine standing over an ironing board," she says. The act of ironing epitomizes the endless tasks that have beset the narrator. She expresses the hope that her daughter can transcend such frustration, rise above her circumstances and learn "that she is more than the dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."

Historical Context The Great Depression The narrator of "I Stand Here Ironing" describes her daughter as "a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear." Though the story was published in 1961, it too has been seen as having ties to the Depression era and to the socially conscious literature of the thirties. Regardless of whether Olsen's work in 1961 bears much resemblance to

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writings from the 1930s, the Great Depression remained very much a part of the American psyche long after the decade was over. Even during the more prosperous 1950s and 1960s, many people still remembered the severe deprivations caused by the country's disastrous economic collapse in the 1930s and lived in fear of repeating the experience. Differences in values present in those old enough to remember the Depression years and values held by children too young to remember those years have been cited as a major cause of the ' 'generation gap'' that came to characterize America in the 1960s. Many people who lived through the Depression, including Olsen, were radicalized by their experience and joined communist and socialist movements. The United States government began massive efforts to provide relief to the poor through programs like the Work Projects Administration (WPA). Writers from the period such as John Steinbeck, Katherine Anne Porter, and Richard Wright hoped to inspire reform by creating literature that depicted the plight of the poor in a realistic manner.

The Eisenhower Era The relatively prosperous 1950s were characterized by a growing conservatism and mistrust of radical intellectuals. Having won World War II after dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, the United States began its Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union. Many people felt it was important to root out radicals living in the United States and to neutralize the "threat" these people were believed to represent. Thus began the infamous House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, a series of public "trials" of suspected American Communists conducted by members of the U.S. Congress, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy. The HUAC hearings have since come to represent one of the darkest moments in American history. Before Senator McCarthy was exposed for falsifying evidence and otherwise violating the civil rights of those he accused, the lives and reputations of hundreds of innocent people were ruined. The 1950s also saw a rapid expansion of the middle class and the rise to prominence of the suburban lifestyle. Some have seen it as an era of rigid conformism. For many of the women who had worked outside the home during World War II, the role of housewife into which they were recast seemed particularly oppressive. The repressed frustration and anger of suburban, middle-class housewives contributed much to the new ' 'women's liberation'' and feminist movements of the 1960s, particularly

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Compare &

Contrast 1963: Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique, the first notable publication of the modern women's movement, in which Friedan outlines the position of women as second-class citizens in contemporary life. 1994: Mary Pipher publishes Reviving Ophelia, in which she illustrates how adolescent girls are forced to conform to strict societal conventions that are often at odds with a girl's true emerging identity. 1960: 39 percent of married American women work outside the home.

following the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

Critical Overview The four stories which Olsen wrote during the 1950s and then published as Tell Me a Riddle in 1961 are the only short stories she has published. Besides these stories, her published work totals one novel and a number of essays. Nonetheless, Olsen's four short stories have had an impressive impact on the literary world since their first appearance. They have been reprinted in countless anthologies, and Olsen has been heralded as an early champion of a new feminist movement in literature. In The New York Times Book Review, prominent contemporary novelist Margaret Atwood describes the importance of Olsen and her work, particularly to women: ' 'Few writers have gained such wide respect based on such a small body of published work.... Among women writers in the United States, 'respect' is too pale a word: 'reverence' is more like it." When Olsen published her volume of stories upon completion of her studies at the Stanford University Creative Writing Program, her work was

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1995: 61 percent of married American women work outside the home. 1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson declares a "national war on poverty" and creates the Office of Economic Opportunity, which coordinates programs such as Job Corps and Head Start. Head Start provides low-income, at-risk children with early education and nurturing. 1994: A Republican-dominated Congress, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, declares a national war on welfare and suggests a return to the use of orphanages.

immediately well-received by critics. Initially, her stories were often seen as beautifully crafted but bleak in outlook. In a 1961 review in The Commonweal, for example, Richard M. Elman describes "I Stand Here Ironing,'' in his view the most excellent of Olsen's stories, as "a catalogue of the failure of intimacy." A 1963 essay by William Van O'Connor in Studies in Short Fiction also seems to find nothing but despair in a story which features a daughter who imagines that nothing matters because we will all soon be killed by atomic bombs and a mother who wants to believe that there is "still enough to live by," but is unable to convince her daughter. Subsequent critics, perhaps informed by more feminist sensibilities, have seen more optimistic elements in the story. For example, Elizabeth Fisher, editor of Aphra, The Feminist Literary Magazine, suggests in a 1972 essay in The Nation that "I Stand Here Ironing'' is ' 'also a hopeful story of how children survive, sometimes even making strength, or talent, out of the deprivations they've endured.'' Joanne S. Frye, in a 1981 Studies in Short Fiction essay, argues that Emily, despite her quip about everyone being "atom-dead" soon, "does not, in fact, succumb to that despairing view; rather, she is asserting her own right to choice as she lightly

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claims her wish to sleep late in the morning." Frye goes on to argue that the mother, despite her despair over being unable to "total it all," does finally manage to "recenter her thoughts," and ultimately triumphs as a parent in her acknowledgement of her daughter's independence. Frye reads the mother's final resolution—"Let her be"—as an indication that the mother "trust[s] the power of each to 'find her way' even in the face of powerful external constraints on individual control." Olsen's work has also inspired a great deal of critical analysis which takes a biographical approach, perhaps because the author has been so candid about how circumstances in her life have affected her writing. Olsen, an acclaimed critic and lecturer in her own right, has acknowledged that the demands of her marriage and four children have distracted her from writing and limited her literary output. Many of Olsen's fellow writers and critics have expressed admiration for her ability to overcome these obstacles. Women writers, in particular, have seen her as a role model. Many critics have pointed to the obvious parallels between Olsen's life and that of the narrator in ' 'I Stand Here Ironing." Olsen, too, was abandoned by her first husband during the Depression after giving birth to one child and later had more children with a second husband. Critics have found metaphors in Olsen's story for her own literary career and for the process of writing in general. Just as Olsen's literary career has been interrupted by the heavy demands placed on a working mother, so the narrator has been distracted from providing the kind of nurturing she would have liked to for her eldest child. The narrator is also interrupted from telling her story and from finding its "total." Critics have suggested that the mother-narrator and her account of the special challenges she has faced through motherhood parallel the unique challenges faced by women writers.

Criticism Elisabeth Piedmont-Morton Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon is the coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she explores the autobiographical elements in ' 7 Stand

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Here Ironing," and discusses Olsen's inclusion of poor and underrepresented people and their situations in her work. "I Stand Here Ironing" is the first story in Tillie Olsen's awarding-winning collection, Tell Me a Riddle, which was first published in 1961 when Olsen was in her late forties. In this story, which is considered her most autobiographical, Olsen breaks new literary ground in creating the voice of the mother-narrator and in crafting a narrative structure that mirrors as well as describes female experience. Like the four other stories in the collection,' 'I Stand Here Ironing" portrays the "aching hardships of poverty and the themes of exile or exclusion." This story, according to critics Mickey Pearlman and Abby Werlock in Tillie Olsen, "presents us with the inexorable riddle of human existence: it paradoxically comprises not merely the endurance of poverty, bigotry, illness, and pain but the ultimate ability to transcend these." Olsen is one of those authors whose life is so integral to her writing that any reading of her fiction is greatly enriched by comparisons between her life experiences and the fictional lives she creates. Olsen's critics, and Olsen herself in numerous speeches and interviews, have identified the three consuming passions of her life: politics, writing, and mothering. Her remarkable contribution to literature and to the advancement of women's causes, is her insistence that all three of these are connected: that motherhood always has a political dimension, and that politics cannot be separated from families, for example. What she also recognizes, however, is that the material conditions of women's lives prevent them from engaging in all three of these issues simultaneously; that political activism may disqualify one from motherhood; or that motherhood may consume the time and energy needed for writing. Twenty years separated Olsen's initial convictions that "she must write," and her first publications. In a 1971 speech, she explained that she "raised four children without household help... [and] worked outside the home in everyday jobs as well." She further stated that during "the years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks." Alice Walker once praised Olsen for rescuing the lives of forgotten and invisible people, and other critics have agreed that Olsen's work has preserved the histories of people who have traditionally been

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What Do I Read Next? "Tell Me a Riddle" (1961) is Tillie Olsen's award-winning story about the sacrifices a Jewish immigrant couple has had to make in order for their marriage to survive.

ment with modern society as she struggles to raise her children against the backdrop of the city's dangerous steel mills.

The Second Sex (1949) by French writer Simone de Beauvoir. A landmark book that outlines the biological, historical, and social origins of women's oppression. Recognized as one of the books that helped launch the feminist movement.

"Blues Ain't No Mocking Bird" (1972) a short story published in Toni Cade Bambara's collection Gorilla, My Love. An impoverished African-American family attracts the attention of a film crew gathering footage for a project on the county food-stamp program. Despite the protests of a grandmother and her husband, the men trespass on the family's property and refuse to stop filming the family's humble living quarters.

The Dollmaker (1954) by Harriette Arnow. A novel about a poor, Southern, working-class family that moves to Detroit during World War II. Chronicles the mother's growing disillusion-

underrepresented in literature. Olsen's career proves her conviction that ' 'literature can be made out of the lives of despised people." Walker also gave Olsen credit for her pioneering efforts to portray the lives of the poor, the working class, females, and non-whites well before these subjects received widespread attention. Critics have lauded "I Stand Here Ironing" for articulating a strong female voice, especially in the mother-narrator's reflections on her life as a mother and a worker. The story is one of the best examples in literature—and certainly one of the first—to offer readers a glimpse into the lives of working-class women and families from a woman's perspective. The dedication to her book of essays, Silences, reads in part: "For our silenced people, century after century after their being consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made— as their other contributions—anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost." "I Stand Here Ironing" appears to be straightforward and simple on the first reading, but a closer study reveals a sophisticated narrative structure and a rich pattern of imagery. Olsen frequently mentioned in interviews that she was especially proud of the story's first sentence, and wished she could duplicate its directness and economy: ' 'I stand here

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ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." The apparent simplicity of this sentence belies the complexity of the narrative situation. Readers are introduced to a woman who appears to be addressing them directly. While it quickly becomes clear that the "you" of the first sentence is in fact some school official, readers are drawn into the narrative and soon come to occupy the position of sympathetic listener. The mother revisits the nineteen years of her daughters life, but the narrative remains anchored in the present because of the act of ironing. Like most women with children, her story is constantly interrupted by other demands and she is accustomed to ' 'engaging in her private thoughts while simultaneously carrying on with household tasks and family interactions." In fact, as her story reveals, her life has been interrupted by childbirth, desertion, poverty, numerous jobs, childcare, remarriage, frequent relocations, and five children. The pace and shape of this narrative is as familiar to the mother-narrator as is the act of ironing. The mother's ironing not only keeps us attuned to the immediacy of her experiences, it provides the central metaphor for the story. Like Alice Walker's use of quilting in "Everyday Use," Olsen's ironing metaphor resonates both inside and outside the

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I fictional boundaries of the story. On one level, the ironing metaphor is significant because it belongs almost exclusively to the domestic world of women. Not only is ironing women's work, but more often than not women iron for other people. On a more figurative level, mothering is also an act of ironing, of smoothing out problems, of making things right and ordered. But as the story of her first child's difficult upbringing unfolds, the iron begins to take on another, more sinister array of qualities. It is helpful here to recall another aspect of the author's personal life that bears on the story. Olsen spent many of her working years in factories, and as a young girl worked as a tie presser, laboring long hours with hot and dangerous equipment under deplorable working conditions. She has dedicated her life to fighting for social change and the rights of the oppressed, especially workers. She also was an active socialist in the 1930s and even spent time in jail for her role in a factory strike. With these things in mind, the attentive reader listens to the mother struggling with "dredging the past," knowing she will "never total it all." The iron comes to represent, then, the pressures of outside forces and the accidents of history into which we are born, such as poverty, divorce, illness, and prejudice. After she asks a total of thirteen questions, critics have noted, ranging from ' 'how could I have known?" to "what was the cost?" the narrator suddenly pauses (we can imagine her lifting the iron from the board). She concludes that "all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight." The adjective heavy focuses our attention on the iron, which has not literally grown heavier, though the narrator may be fatigued. But on a figurative level, it has become heavier, taken on weight and significance as it has come to represent the pressures of outside forces on individuals in general and on Emily in particular. The mother's conclusion to "let her be" is not an abdication of her parental rights; rather it is a recognition that her powers as a mother cannot control the oppressive forces of the outside world. She ends her monologue with a prayer-like hope that her daughter will come to know ' 'that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." This ending suggests that the narrator comes to this resolution not despite the fact that her life allows her time for introspection only while working, but because of the work. The twin process of ironing and thinking out loud about the past do not

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en's critics, and Olsen herself in numerous speeches and interviews, have identified the three consuming passions of her life: politics, writing, and mothering."

simply move "tormented back and forth," but progress, from questions to answers, from unknown to known. Olsen's narrator learns something in the act of ironing, and the iron itself has been a crucial part of that process, leading her to a fuller understanding of her motherhood through its insistent metaphorical meanings. Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marlon, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

Rose Kamel In the following excerpted essay, Kamel discusses "I Stand Here Ironing" and its theme of women whose potential for creativity, growth, and opportunity has been denied them due to their race, sex, religion, and socio-economic status. In 1954 . . . Olsen published the brilliant short story ' 'I Stand Here Ironing,'' having served a prolonged apprenticeship during which "there was a conscious storing, snatched reading, beginnings of writing" and always "the secret rootlets of reconnaissance." This reconnaissance involved not only obsessive reading but internalizing the lives of women writers, especially writers who were also mothers. Their emergence is evidence of changing circumstances making possible for them what (with rarest exception) was not possible in the generations of women before. I hope and I fear for what will result. I hope (and believe) that complex new richness will come into literature; I fear because almost certainly their work will be impeded, lessened, partial. For the fundamental situation remains unchanged. Unlike men writers who marry, most will not have the societal equivalent of a wife—nor (in a society hostile to growing life) anyone but themselves to mother their children....

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The mother has remarried, but material comforts, an emotionally secure middle-class existence, cannot assuage her loneliness."

"I Stand Here Ironing" depicts a nameless mother-narrator, who, having received a phone call from her daughter Emily's high-school guidance counselor that Emily is an underachiever, pushes an iron to and fro across the board on which Emily's dress lies shapeless and wrinkled. The narrator begins "dredging the past and all that compounds a human being." Her thoughts flow with the rhythm of the iron as she attempts to grasp the "rootlet of reconnaissance" to explain why it was that her oldest child was one "seldom smiled at." What would appear as understandable reasons—the Depression, the nineteen-year old mother, who at her daughter's present age worked at menial jobs during the day and at household chores at night, the iron necessity that made her place Emily in a series of foster homes, the desertion of her first husband, bearing and rearing four other children of a second marriage, all clamoring for attention—should account for Emily's chronic sorrow; but somehow they do not. Necessity dominating the mother's life could have tempered Emily, but the reader soon perceives that there may be another reason why Emily and the mother-narrator are silenced counterparts. The mother has remarried, but material comforts, an emotionally secure middle-class existence, cannot assuage her loneliness. Never having experienced the celebratory rituals of working-class communality, middle-class anomie distances her from other women. Her entire adult life has been interrupted by child care described by Olsen quoting [Sally Bingham in Silences]: My work "writing" is reduced to five or six hours a week, always subject to interruptions and cancellations ... I don't believe there is a solution to the problem, or at least I don't believe there is one which recognizes the emotional complexities involved. A life without children is, I believe, an impoverished life for most women; yet life with children imposes de-

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mands that consume energy and imagination at the same time, cannot be delegated—even supposing there were a delegate available.

In "I Stand Here Ironing," characteristic stylistic clues embedded in the occasionally inverted syntax, run-on sentences interspersed with fragments, repetitions, alliterative parallels, an incantatory rhythm evoke the narrator's longing not only for a lost child but for a lost language whereby she can order the chaotic dailiness of a working mother's experience. She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her pouring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been—and would be, I would tell her—and was now to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or non-existent. Including mine.... Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one's own but must always be racked and listening for the child to cry, the child call. We sit for awhile and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with its soft aisles of light. "Shoogily," he breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, invented by her to say: comfort.

Emily's word play appears rooted in Yiddish (shoogily—meshugah) and there is something archetypically talmudic in her fascination with riddles (for which a younger sibling gets recognition) ' 'that was my riddle, Mother, I told it to Susan...," foreshadowing the leitmotif Olsen will orchestrate in "Tell Me a Riddle." When language inventiveness fails to mitigate against Emily's lack of achievement at school, when she tries and fails to authenticate herself, she escapes into another's role. Desperate for attention, identity, she responds to the mother's suggestion that she try out for a high school play— [Olsen notes in Silences that] "not to have an audience is a kind of death"— and becomes a comic crowd pleaser to the sound of thunderous applause. Thus, Emily finally commands some attention and affection and to a limited extent a control of life's randomness. Nonetheless, only articulation through language can free her from oppression. Silenced at home she lacks and will probably continue to lack centrality. The story ends with the mother still ironing out the wrinkles in Emily's dress; like Emily she is "helpless before the iron," aware that this Sisyphuslike ritual cannot atone for the past, nor can she

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ultimately answer the riddle Emily poses within and without the family constellation. Certainly the chains of necessity should have justified the mother's past relationship with her eldest child. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother. I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were many years that she did not want me to touch her. She kept too much to herself,... My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably nothing will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear. Source: Rose Kamel, "Literary Foremothers and Writers' Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical Fiction," in MEWS, Vol. 12, no. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 55-72.

Joanne S. Frye In the following essay, Frye asserts that motherhood is presented in Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" as a metaphor for the individual's search for selfhood and as a literary experience. Motherhood as literary metaphor has long been a cliche for the creative process: the artist gives birth to a work of art which takes on a life of its own. Motherhood as literary experience has only rarely existed at all, except as perceived by a resentful or adoring son who is working through his own identity in separation from the power of a nurturant and/or threatening past. The uniqueness of Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" lies in its fusion of motherhood as both metaphor and experience: it shows us motherhood bared, stripped of romantic distortion, and reinfused with the power of genuine metaphorical insight into the problems of selfhood in the modern world. The story seems at first to be a simple meditation of a mother reconstructing her daughter's past in an attempt to explain present behavior. In its pretense of silent dialogue with the school's guidance counselor—a mental occupation to accompany the physical occupation of ironing—it creates the impression of literal transcription of a mother's thought processes in the isolation of performing household tasks: "I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron." Indeed, this surface level provides the narrative thread for our insights into both Emily and her mother. The mother's first person narrative

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he narrative structure creates a powerful sense of immediacy and an unfamiliar literary experience."

moves chronologically through a personal past which is gauged and anchored by occasional intrusions of the present: "I put the iron down"; "Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him"; "She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know she is happy tonight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call did not happen today."... The story is very fundamentally structured through the mother's present selfhood. It is her reality with which we are centrally concerned, her perception of the process of individuation to which the story gives us access. Her concerns with sorting through Emily's past are her concerns with defining the patterns of her own motherhood and of the limitations on her capacity to care for and support the growth of another human being. As she rethinks the past, she frames her perceptions through such interjections as ' 'I did not know then what I know now'' and ' 'What in me demanded that goodness in her?"—gauges taken from the present self to try to assess her own past behavior. But throughout, she is assessing the larger pattern of interaction between her own needs and constraints and her daughter's needs and constraints. When she defines the hostilities between Emily and her sister Susan—"that terrible balancing of hurts and needs"—she asserts her own recognition not only of an extreme sibling rivalry but also of the inevitable conflict in the separate self-definitions of parent and child. Gauging the hurts and needs of one human being against the hurts and needs of another: this is the pattern of parenthood. But more, it is the pattern of a responsible self living in relationship. The story's immediate reality continually opens onto such larger patterns of human awareness. Ostensibly an answer to the school counselor, the mother's interior monologue becomes a meditation on human existence, on the interplay among exter-

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nal contingencies, individual needs, and individual responsibilities. The narrative structure creates a powerful sense of immediacy and an unfamiliar literary experience. But it also generates a unique capacity for metaphorical insight into the knowledge that each individual—like both the mother and the daughter—can act only from the context of immediate personal limitations but must nonetheless act through a sense of individual responsibility. The narrator sets the context for this general concern by first defining the separateness of mother and daughter:' 'You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me." Almost defensively, she cites too the difficulties of finding time and being always—as mothers are—susceptible to interruption. But in identifying an even greater difficulty in the focus of her parental responsibility, she highlights the thematic concern with guilt and responsibility: "Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped." She is, in other words, setting out to assess her own responsibility, her own failure, and finally her need to reaffirm her own autonomy as a separate human being who cannot be defined solely through her parental role. When she identifies the patterns of isolation and alienation between herself and her daughter, she is further probing the awareness of her own separateness and the implicit separation between any two selfhoods. The convalescent home to which she sent Emily as a child is premised on establishing an "invisible wall" between visiting parents and their children on the balconies above. But, in fact, that wall is only an extreme instance of an inevitable separateness, of all the life that is lived ' 'outside of me, beyond me." Even in her memory of deeply caring conversations with her daughter, the mother can only claim to provide an occasional external eye, a person who can begin to narrate for the daughter the continuity of the daughter's own past and emergent selfhood but who must stand outside that selfhood separated by her own experiences and her own needs.... The tension in Emily's personality—which has continually been defined as light and glimmering yet rigid and withheld—comes to a final focus in the self-mocking humor of her allusion to the most

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powerful cultural constraint on human behavior: nothing individual matters because "in a couple years we'll all be atom-dead." But Emily does not, in fact, succumb to that despairing view; rather she is asserting her own right to choice as she lightly claims her wish to sleep late in the morning. Though the mother feels more heavily the horror of this judgment, she feels its weight most clearly in relation to the complexity of individual personhood and responsibility: "because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight." And when she goes on from her despairing inability to "total it all" to the story's conclusion, she recenters her thoughts on the tenuous balance between the powerful cultural constraints and the need to affirm the autonomy of the self in the face of those constraints: ' 'Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron." Her efforts, then,' 'to gather together, to try and make coherent" are both inevitably doomed to failure and finally successful. There cannot be— either for parent or for story-teller—a final coherence, a final access to defined personality, or a full sense of individual control. There is only the enriched understanding of the separateness of all people—even parents from children—and the necessity to perceive and foster the value of each person's autonomous selfhood. Though that selfhood is always limited by the forces of external constraints, it is nonetheless defined and activated by the recognition of the "seal" each person sets on surrounding people and the acceptance of responsibility for one's own actions and capacities. At best, we can share in the efforts to resist the fatalism of life lived helplessly "before the iron"—never denying the power of the iron but never yielding to the iron in final helplessness either. We must trust the power of each to ' 'find her way'' even in the face of powerful external constraints on individual control. The metaphor of the iron and the rhythm of the ironing establish a tightly coherent framework for the narrative probing of a mother-daughter relationship. But the fuller metaphorical structure of the story lies in the expansion of the metaphorical power of that relationship itself. Without ever relinquishing the immediate reality of motherhood and

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the probing of parental responsibility, Tillie Olsen has taken that reality and developed its peculiar complexity into a powerful and complex statement on the experience of responsible selfhood in the modern world. In doing so she has neither trivialized nor romanticized the experience of motherhood; she has indicated the wealth of experience yet to be explored in the narrative possibilities of experiences, like motherhood, which have rarely been granted serious literary consideration.... Source: Joanne S. Frye, '"I Stand Here Ironing': Motherhood as Experience and Metaphor," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 18, no. 3, Summer, 1981, pp. 287-92.

Sources

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Fisher, Elizabeth. "The Passion of Tillie Olsen," in The Nation, April 10, 1972, pp. 472-4. O'Connor, William Van.' 'The Short Stories of Tillie Olsen,'' in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 1, no. 1, Fall, 1963, pp. 21-25. Pearlman, Mickey and Abby Werlock. Tillie Olsen, edited by Warren French, Twayne, 1991.

Further Reading Faulkner, Mara. Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen, University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 1-34. Faulkner examines the political aspects of Olsen's work and its representation of the lives of people outside of the literary mainstream.

Atwood, Margaret. "Obstacle Course," in The New York Times Book Review, July 30,1978.

Frye, Joanne S. Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne, 1995, pp. 3-36. Explores Olsen's works and their connections to her life as well as the lives of her readers.

Elman, Richard M. "The Many Forms Which Loss Can Take," in Commonweal, Vol. LXXV, no. 11, December 8, 1961, pp. 295-6.

Orr, Elaine Neil. Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision, University Press of Mississippi, 1987, 193 p. Examines Olsen's works within a feminist context.

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The Jilting of Granny Weatherall Katherine Anne Porter

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Katherine Anne Porter's story, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'' was first published in transition magazine in February, 1929. The story, concerning a dying woman's memory of being left at the altar on her wedding day and her current fear of being jilted in a similar manner by God, was subsequently collected in Porter's first published book, Flowering Judas. She has said that the character of Granny Weatherall was based on her own grandmother and that the story was the first of many of her works to be inspired by her Texas roots. Porter's often fragile health may have also influenced the story. In 1918, she nearly died of influenza; funeral arrangements had been made and her obituary written. In her autobiography, Porter stated that the experience made her different from others: "I had what the Christians call the 'beatific vision,' and the Greeks called the 'happy day,' the happy vision just before death." Such experience may have led her to explore that moment of death in her fiction, a moment in which Granny Weatherall feels that her body is ' 'a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up." Nevertheless, the story has remained popular since its publication for the complexities and ambiguities inherent in its stream-ofconsciousness narrative and for its carefully drawn portrait of a Southern matriarch confronting the sum total of her life.

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Author Biography Katherine Anne Porter was born in Indian Creek, Texas, in 1890. Her mother died when she was two, and her family moved to Austin where she and her four siblings were raised by their paternal grandmother. When she was eleven, Porter's grandmother died and she was sent to convent schools, first in Texas, and then in Louisiana. At sixteen she ran away from the school's stifling environment and got married—her first of four trips to the altar. The union ended in divorce three years later, and Porter, who called herself a "roving spirit," found work in various cities as it pleased her. First she moved to Chicago, where she was a journalist and movie extra; then Denver, Colorado, where she worked as a drama critic for the Rocky Mountain News; and then New York City. At this time, when she was only twenty-eight, she suffered a near-fatal attack of influenza that caused her hair to turn white. The permanent effect became one of her trademarks and also the basis for her novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider. In 1920 she moved to Mexico and became involved in a coup attempt to overthrow the president. The social situation of Mexico became the basis for her first published story, "Maria Concepcion," and for many years, Porter claimed she understood Mexico more than any other place she had lived. Flowering Judas, her first collection of fiction, was published in 1930 and was comprised of stories that had previously appeared in various literary magazines. Porter's well-known story "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" was included in this collection. The book earned her a Guggenheim fellowship which afforded her the means to travel through Europe extensively. On a cruise to Germany in 1932 she met Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, who along with the other diverse passengers inspired her only novel, Ship of Fools. She stayed in Germany for a year before travelling to Paris where she lived for four years, becoming one of the many expatriate American writers in the city, whose booksellers and publishers created a hospitable climate for the literary community before World War II. Back in the United States in 1936, Porter lectured and served as a writer-in-residence at many universities. With the success of Ship of Fools in 1962, Porter retired from academic life and continued to write from her home in College Park, Maryland. Her last book, The Never-Ending Wrong was inspired by the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, in which two Italian political radicals were executed

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despite widespread belief of their innocence. Porter died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1980 at the age of ninety.

Plot Summary The setting for ' The Jilting of Granny Weatherall'' is the bedroom where Granny Weatherall is dying, though most of the action occurs in Granny's head. Told as a stream-of-consciousness monologue, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is the story of the last day in the eighty-year-old woman's life. In her final hours with her surviving children around her bed, Granny Weatherall reconsiders her life and ponders her impending death. Almost against her will, her thoughts return to an incident that occurred more than sixty years earlier: She was left standing alone at the altar when her fiance George jilted her. Porter gradually reveals the details of the jilting through Granny Weatherall "s fragmented recollections. In Granny Weatherall's semi-conscious state, the past mingles with the present and people and objects take on new forms and identities. After the doctor leaves her alone, Granny Weatherall takes stock of her life, taking pleasure in the thought' 'that a person could spread out the plan of life and tuck the edges in orderly." But it is not long before she finds "death in her mind and it felt clammy and unfamiliar." The presence of death in her thoughts causes her to recall an earlier time when she thought she was dying and how she had spent too much time preparing for it. This time she considers "all the food she had cooked, and all the clothes she had cut and sewed, and all the gardens she had made"' and declares herself satisfied. She imagines asking her late husband, "Well, I didn't do so badly, did I?" Like an unwelcome guest, the memory of the day when she was jilted interrupts Granny Weatherall's reflections. As she rests against her pillow she is transported back to the day when ' 'she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man" who never arrived. Although "for sixty years she had prayed against remembering him," she decides now as her children hover around her that she wants to settle things with George, the truant bridegroom. What she wants is to even their accounts, to tell him ' 'I got my husband just the same and my children and my house just like any other woman." The memory of that day ' 'when the cake was not cut, but thrown out and wasted'' is so powerful that sixty years later she seems to relive the moment. Her memory recalls when ' 'the whole

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wedding day when she was twenty. She eventually married another man, had a family, and convinced herself that she had put the pain of being ' 'jilted'' behind her. However, she kept letters from George in her attic all her life, and sixty years later his memory still has the power to upset her.

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bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away." The border between past and present, living and dead, becomes even more blurred in the final pages of the story and the final minutes of Granny Weatherall's life. While the priest gives her last rights, Granny slips closer to death and the sights and sounds in the room mingle with her memories. When she grasps her son's thumb, she realizes this is the moment of death. As ' 'the blue light from Cornelia's lampshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain," Granny asks God for "asign," some reassurance about the afterlife. But ' 'for the second time there was no sign." Granny Weatherall is jilted once again in a betrayal that is so monumental that it makes the first incident seem insignificant. ' 'She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away."

Characters George George is the man who jilted Granny Weatherall, abandoning her at the altar on what was to be their

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Hapsy is the youngest and apparently the favorite of Granny Weatherall's daughters—"the one she had truly wanted." Yet Hapsy also seems to cause her mother the greatest disappointment. Granny Weatherall asks for Hapsy five times during the story, but Hapsy never comes to her mother's deathbed. In her delirious state of mind, Granny mistakes her other daughters, Cornelia and Lydia, for Hapsy. At one point, Granny seems to confuse even herself with Hapsy, as a memory of Hapsy holding a baby comes back to her: Granny ' 'seemed to herself to be Hapsy also, and the baby on Hapsy's arm was Hapsy and himself and herself, all at once, and there was no surprise in the meeting." Some critics have interpreted this memory of Hapsy as the sign of salvation that Granny seems to be looking for throughout the story.

John John is the man whom Granny Weatherall married and with whom she had children. He has been dead for a long time, and though Granny still feels close to him, she is also aware of having gone through many changes since she lived with him.

Ellen Weatherall See Granny Weatherall

Granny Weatherall Ellen Weatherall is a strong-willed eightyyear-old woman on her deathbed. Having raised a large family, she still desires to play an active role in her own affairs and those of her children. Bedridden in her daughter Cornelia's house, she is often snappish and rude as she slips in and out of lucidity during visits from members of her family, a doctor, and a priest. Readers learn that some twenty years earlier, feeling old at age sixty, she had made what she had thought would be her final visits to her children and grandchildren: "She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again." As death approaches this time, however, memories of loss and disappointment resurface and remain unresolved.

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As a young woman, Ellen Weatherall was jilted, abandoned at the altar by a fiance named George. She overcame this setback and eventually married another man. Yet, on her deathbed, remembering these defining moments in her life brings back feelings of self-doubt and regret. Granny Weatherall feels ' 'jilted'' once again at the end of the story—perhaps because her favorite daughter, Hapsy, has not shown up at her bedside, and perhaps also because she has become aware of a more profound absence in her spiritual life.

Themes A portrait of an eighty-year-old woman on her deathbed,' "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is an exploration of the human mind as it struggles to come to terms with loss and mortality. Porter offers no clear resolution to these fundamental issues, but instead interweaves themes of betrayal, religion, death, and memory in a moving and poetic character study.

Betrayal The titles of both the story and the anthology (Flowering Judas) in which it first appeared suggest the idea of betrayal, a central theme underlying many of Porter's stories. Judas was the disciple who betrayed Christ with a kiss. At the heart of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" are Granny's memories of her betrayal by George, the fiance who abandoned her at the altar some sixty years earlier. This is just one of a series of betrayals experienced by Granny, who also feels ' 'jilted'' by her daughter Hapsy for whom she calls out in vain several times in the story.

God and Religion Many readers have suggested that the ultimate betrayal of Granny involves God and that the story is primarily a portrait of a woman at the end of her life facing a devastating spiritual crisis. When Father Connolly comes to visit Granny Weatherall on her deathbed, she is cordial to him. It is stated that Granny "felt easy about her soul." Yet, his arrival seems to trigger Granny's most vivid and painful memories of the day sixty years earlier when she was left by her fiance. The final paragraph appears

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Media Adaptations Collected Stories: K. A. Porter is available on audiocassette, published by Audio Partners, read by Siobhan McKenna, 170 minutes. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall was produced by PBS in 1980 for the American Short Story Series. The adaptation stars Geraldine Fitzgerald, Lois Smith, and William Swetland; hosted by Henry Fonda, 57 minutes; available on videocassette from Monterey Home Video and Karol Video.

to include a reference to the Biblical parable of the "foolish brides," in which Christ is compared to a bridegroom. Seen in this light, the ultimate jilting of Granny is her reluctance to acknowledge her own weaknesses and accept some form of spiritual salvation. Just as Granny was left alone with the priest on her wedding day as a twenty-year-old, at age eighty she faces death alone, accompanied only by a priest who seems unable to offer her sufficient comfort.

Death and the Cycle of Life Early in the story, the suggestion is made that Granny Weatherall considers herself to be already at peace with her mortality. Some twenty years earlier she had made "farewell trips" to see all her loved ones:' 'She had spent so much time preparing for death there was no need for bringing it up again." However, death proves to be not so easily dismissed and seems "clammy and unfamiliar" now that it is truly imminent for her. Granny Weatherall struggles against death, and though she lacks the strength to get out of bed, denies even being ill. She tries to dismiss her doctor and imagines herself the next day ' 'rolling up her sleeves putting the whole place to rights again." The final image in the story—of Granny blowing out a candle—evokes the notion that her life is coming to an end. Yet, there is no sense of closure to Granny's life, no sense that the conflicts raised in her memories have been resolved. The final realization in the

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Topics for Further Study If the story were told in third-person through the eyes of a narrator who was not Granny Weatherall, how would it be different? Do you think that if it had been written from a different point of view that it would still be a good story? Discuss the symbolism of Granny Weatherall's name. Think of some other names from literary works that have symbolic meanings. Do such tactics help you understand a story or novel better? Research the phenomenon of the near-death experience. How do some people's accounts of what they believe to be death compare with Granny Weatherall's? How are they similar, and how are they different?

experienced in being ' 'jilted. "She values occasional moments for reflection when she is able to ' 'spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly." She also finds comfort in remembering her late husband John and is confident that he would still understand her despite all the changes she has gone through since his death—' 'She wouldn't have to explain anything!" On the other hand, Granny's reminiscences also seem to reopen old emotional wounds and bring back painful experiences she thought she had put behind her. Her memory of the other man in her life, George, seems to undermine her sense of order and self-worth and to create a kind of debris she has had difficulty throwing out. She is made "uneasy" by the thought of her children discovering the box of letters from George which she has kept in her attic all these years. At one point, she even fantasizes about going to the absurd length of instructing her daughter to find George and ' 'be sure to tell him I forgot him."

Style story is that "there was no bottom to death, she couldn't come to the end of it." As death approaches, many of Granny Weatherall's reflections on her life concern her role as a mother and caretaker. Besides the memories of being ' 'jilted'' early on in her efforts to find a mate, she thinks mostly of her children. In one passage, she remembers her favorite daughter, Hapsy, who has herself apparently become a mother. The identities of mother, daughter, and grandchild all seem to merge in Granny's mind. Death and birth also become hard to distinguish as Granny, in pain on her deathbed, in a memory relives the pain of giving birth to Hapsy. She finally welcomes the presence of a doctor as she cries out ambiguously, ' 'my time has come."

Memory Memory is a double-edged sword in this story where the central character moves back and forth between the present reality and the remembered past. On the one hand, Granny Weatherall's memories are a source of strength for her; she seems to take pride in remembering her life's accomplishments, particularly in overcoming the setback she

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Early in her career, Porter came to be admired as an innovative and masterful stylist. In ' 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," she uses experimental, modernist narrative techniques in creating a moving and believable portrait of an eighty-year-old woman on her deathbed.

Stream-of-Consciousness Narration One of the most striking stylistic aspects of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is its unusual narrative perspective. Though the story is written in the third person, its narrative point of view is extremely close to that of the central character, Granny Weatherall. The story is told through stream-of-consciousness. Granny's thoughts are presented in a spontaneous fashion, as if readers had access to her thoughts at the moment each one occurs to her. Porter conveys what it is like to be an eighty-year-old woman whose mind tends to wander by enabling readers to experience some of the same confusion Granny feels. Since Granny sometimes mistakes one daughter for another, for example, the characters in the story sometimes dissolve and become other characters. Because Granny's awareness slips back and forth between her present reality and her remembered past, events in

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the story are presented as they occur to Granny rather than chronologically.

Symbolism and Allusion The disjointed way in which the story is told gives it a poetic, dreamlike quality and enables its author to juxtapose certain recurring motifs and images. Much of Granny's reminiscing about the past seems to be triggered by people and events in her present. The untidiness of the room in her daughter's house where she is lying, for example, reminds Granny of her own housekeeping, which reminds her of the box of letters in her attic that she has been intending to go through and of the man, George, who wrote some of those letters. As certain images appear and reappear throughout the story, they take on more associations with the events of Granny's life and acquire multi-layered, symbolic significance. The dust Granny worries about as it gathers on the objects around her, for example, could be seen as representing the disorder in Granny's life and the painful memories she has tried unsuccessfully to sweep away. The layers of meaning within some of the recurring images in the story are multiplied since they allude to motifs from the Bible. As the story's title suggests, the most significant of these are those associated with Granny's "jilting." The story returns to Granny's abortive wedding day most vividly, perhaps, when her daughter Cornelia announces that a priest has come to visit. His arrival seems to trigger Granny's memories of the day when "the bottom dropped out of the world" and she found herself being supported by the arms of a man offering to kill the fiance who had failed to show up. It appears that Granny, on her deathbed, is once again left alone waiting in vain for the arrival of a loved one—in this case her daughter Hapsy—with only the inadequate comfort offered to her by a priest. Parallels between Granny's situation and that of the "foolish brides" in the biblical parable in which Christ is compared to a bridegroom are suggested in the story's last paragraph: "Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house." The symbols and allusions in the story are constructed so that they can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Granny can be judged as a woman who, like the "foolish brides," has not accepted Christ and for whom death therefore represents a spiritual and physical collapse. Another interpretation views the closing reference to the biblical parable as a product of Granny's own imagination as she reflects on her life and judges herself. The

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subtlety of Porter's art lies in the fact that she offers no definitive answer to questions of interpretation. Porter leaves readers with a portrait of a woman facing death who is confronting the unanswerable questions of life.

Historical Context Porter once wrote that her stories grew primarily out of her passion for the feelings and motivations of individual people, claiming "I have never known an uninteresting human being, and I have never known two alike." For her, however, fascination with the individual did not preclude an interest in broader social and historical issues. Unique individuals were, in her view, the very building blocks of history—"these beings without which, one by one, all the 'broad movements of history' could never take place." The central character in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," is someone who seems curiously removed from the time and place in which she lives—unable herself even to distinguish past from present. Yet, for Porter, individuals like Granny Weatherall provide the vehicle for an exploration of the broader social and historical forces of her time.

Progress and Social Fragmentation First published in 1929, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" appeared at the end of a period of relative prosperity in America and the beginning of what was to become the Great Depression. Emerging victorious at the end of the first World War, America in the 1920s was poised to undergo rapid economic growth and social progress. For women in particular, many new opportunities and roles were available. The decade began with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which for the first time gave women the right to vote. During the war, when many young men had left to fight in Europe, more women had entered the traditionally male worlds of work and higher education. In fields ranging from fashion to politics to literature, a new generation of women were expressing themselves with new levels of confidence. The general prosperity of the 1920s, however, was not enjoyed by every segment of the population. Much of the economic growth, as well as the experimentation with social norms, was concentrated in large cities and industrial centers. The country was in many ways becoming more fragmented, as

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