Elizabeth Spencer's Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

A MERICAN LITERATURE R EADINGS IN THE 21st CENTURY Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock

The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer

Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production

Catherine Seltzer

ELIZABETH SPENCER'S COMPLICATED CARTOGRAPHIES

Copyright © Catherine Seltzer, 2009. All rights reserved. Portions of this book originally appeared in The Southern Quarterly, v. 46, (Spring 2009). Copyright © 2009 by the University of Southern Mississippi. Reproduced by permission. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61764–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seltzer, Catherine. Elizabeth Spencer's complicated cartographies : reimagining home, the South, and southern literary production / Catherine Seltzer. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century) ISBN 978–0–230–61764–3 (alk. paper) 1. Spencer, Elizabeth, 1921—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Home in literature. 3. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Southern States— In literature. 5. Women and literature—Southern States—History— 20th century. I. Title. PS3537.P4454Z87 2009 813⬘.54—dc22

2008052706

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Owen and Lily

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C on ten t s

Acknowledgments Introduction: Backward Glances and Forward Thinking: Reconsidering Elizabeth Spencer A New History: Reconsidering the Southern Canon A New Terrain: Remapping the South Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies 1 “A Sure Terrain”: Spencer’s Mississippi Novels A Sure Terrain: Teoc and Carrollton A Familiar Landscape: Nashville “Escaping a Feminine Sort of Hovering Over Things”: Fire in the Morning Continued “Calm Strength and Conviction”: This Crooked Way and The Voice at the Back Door 2 Exploding the Can(n)on: The Light in the Piazza “A History Long Past”: The South as “Another Country” “Face to Face with Italy”: Redefining Home 3 Inhabiting the Unhomely Moment in Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories “Falling Through Space”: “Jean-Pierre” Shifting Boundaries and the Familial Home: “The Cousins,” “Jack of Diamonds,” and “The Skater” Bringing it All Back Home Again: The Unhomely Moment in “The Business Venture” 4 “Radical” Re-Envisionings of Home: The Night Travellers

ix

1 4 9 11 15 17 24 33 50 83 86 91 111 115

123 141 151

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Defining Boundaries: “The Home Scene” Pilgrim Wanderers: An Uncertain Exile Borrowed Homes and Unlikely Homecoming

155 162 168

Notes

175

Works Cited

195

Index

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Ack now l ed gmen t s

My first debt in this project is, of course, to Elizabeth Spencer. She has not only been a “subject” of this study but an incredibly gracious participant. I thank her for patiently answering my many questions, for allowing me access to her papers, and for offering her encouragement (often over a delightful meal). I am deeply honored that she has supported my work. I am also lucky to be surrounded by a series of exceptionally generous friends and colleagues. I owe enormous thanks to Linda Wagner-Martin, who has supported this project in immeasurable ways since its inception, and I am grateful to a number of others who have taken the time away from their own work to read and comment on parts of this manuscript, including Charles Berger, Susan Connor, Fred Hobson, Kimball King, Townsend Ludington, Hubert McAlexander, Elsa Nettels, Jessica O’Hara, Jack Raper, Helen and Bob Seltzer, Jennifer Seltzer Stitt, and Rebecca Walsh. I also wish to give special thanks to my colleagues at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville; their continued interest in this project, as well as their friendship, has been crucial to its completion. I have received specific assistance from further afield as well: Karen Raymond at the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa and the staff of the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill all cheerfully helped me to navigate their collections. Additionally, Brigitte Shull and Lee Norton have been especially helpful as they have guided this project through the publication process at Palgrave Macmillan, and Maran Elancheran has served as a careful copyeditor. And institutional support has been critical to this project as well: a dissertation fellowship from the University of North Carolina allowed me to conduct archival research and a summer research fellowship from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville granted me time to revise this manuscript. Ultimately, this book is dedicated to my littlest helpers, Owen and Lily. (It should be noted, I think, that Owen’s enthusiasm waned when he learned there were no pictures in the book, but even in spite of this disappointment he has remained steadfastly patient with its

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progress. And Lily arrived at the end of the writing process, but she has served as an abundantly earnest cheerleader from her bouncy seat. I am overwhelmingly indebted to them both.) My most heartfelt thanks, though, go to my husband, Dave Limbrick, who has supported this project each step of the way. This book would not have been possible without him.

I N T ROD U C T ION

Backward Glances and Forward Thinking: Reconsidering Elizabeth Spencer

I first encountered Elizabeth Spencer’s work in a graduate seminar on southern literature. Her widely anthologized 1959 story “First Dark” was the last work we read in the course, and, to my mind, it functioned as an improbably tidy capstone for the semester that had preceded it: although a relatively short piece, “First Dark” seemed the perfect embodiment of the conventions of southern literature that we had been chronicling. The story is centered on the unlikely courtship of Frances Harvey, the docile scion of one of Richton, Mississippi’s most established families, and Tom Beavers, a poor young man who has recently returned to the town. Over the course of the narrative the couple is haunted, both literally—by the ghost who is occasionally glimpsed at the edge of town—and figuratively—by the specter of the traditional southern hierarchy in which Richton is deeply invested. Certainly, “First Dark’s” characters are instantly recognizable even to the most novice student of southern literature: they comprise a sort of rogue’s gallery of gothic figures—the aging and ever-stoic belle; the dutiful, if tentative, daughter; the prescient but muted outsider; and the eerie but strangely earthly ghost. The story’s themes, too, are familiar to a reader of southern literature: like much of the work of Faulkner, Tate, or Warren, “First Dark” demonstrates a preoccupation with the power of place and the enduring importance of the past. Yet, while “First Dark” can certainly be linked to traditional southern literary conventions, I quickly realized that I was deeply mistaken in simply holding it up to a checklist of southern themes and characters. Repeated readings revealed the story’s uniquely “Spencerian” qualities: its controlled voice, its perfect use of detail, and, significantly, its subtle

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manipulations of the recognizable forms we associate with southern literature. Take, for example, the conclusion of “First Dark,” which unexpectedly (and rather wryly) plays with both with narrative convention and southern literary tradition. At the end of the story, Frances and Tom abruptly leave Richton when they realize that if they are to stay and inherit the Harvey family wealth and status, they must also cede themselves to the rigid narratives that define small-town southern life. The penultimate paragraph of the story is the sort of romantic ending that makes readers cheer: on a shared impulse, the couple leaves the iconic Harvey house together, literally refusing to look behind them as they drive off to create a life that is unfettered by Richton’s values. Yet, this is not the story’s end. Instead, Spencer inverts their triumph in the work’s final lines: Had they done so [looked back], they would have seen that the Harvey house was more beautiful than ever. All unconscious of its rejection by so mere a person as Tom Beavers, it seemed, instead, to have got rid of what did not suit it, to be free, at last, to enter with abandon the land of mourning and shadows and memory. (40)

In these closing lines, the independence that Frances and Tom incontestably obtain in leaving Richton is paralleled by the freedom that the town will experience in the wake of the couple’s self-exile. We can read this ending in a number of ways. Most obviously, we may see the house’s rejection of Frances and Tom as indicative of the South’s investment in its own myth; in refusing to embrace Tom, the Harvey house asserts the inviolability of the traditional southern hierarchy, even though this position resigns it to its own demise. Thus, “First Dark” seems invested in the enduring image of the beautifully doomed South. Yet the story simultaneously critiques this view: Spencer’s intimation that a house—that presumably empty shell that must be transformed into a home by the people within it, if the old apothegm holds true—holds power is telling. We may see in “First Dark” the suggestion that the structures we have erected may take on a life of their own: the myth of a monolithic, genteel South eclipses the realities of southern identity, and, as importantly, the critical scaffolding we have constructed to define the South—and southern literature—may become so rigid that it is as suffocating as the Harvey House is to its occupants. We can advance this thesis even further when we note that Frances and Tom leave the house without looking back. Fourteen years before Spencer wrote “First Dark,” Allen Tate published “The New

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Provincialism,” an essay whose appearance established crucial categories for several generations of southern scholars with its contention that after World War I, “the South reentered the world—but gave a backward glance as it slipped over the border; that backward glance gave us the Southern Renaissance, a literature conscious of the past in the present” (545). In some respects, “First Dark” seems to fit within Tate’s paradigm: the story certainly probes the power of the past, embodied most dramatically by Mrs. Harvey and the Richton ghost. However, we see that the South’s legacy is paralyzing for Frances, and in a move imbued with symbolism, she refuses to take a “backward glance” as she leaves the Harvey home, understanding that this moment of nostalgia may immure her forever in the obligations of a dutiful southerner. Spencer’s decision to keep her characters defiantly facing forward is probably not an intentional jab at Tate or the critical apparatus that was actively shaping the study of southern literature at the time, but it does suggest an alternate model of viewing both the South and its literature: the Harvey house, which confers the power of the aristocratic South, also invites its tenants to “bend their finest loyalties to become bemused custodians of the grave,” a role that Frances and Tom—and, we understand, Spencer—fiercely reject (“First Dark” 39). Thus “First Dark,” a story ostensibly about a haunted house, was an adventitious point of entry into Spencer’s work for me: as I began to read and collect her fiction, I became aware that, taken together, it was haunted by the idea of home. The questions Spencer indirectly poses in “First Dark” are echoed in many of her novels and much of her short fiction. Is the power of the southern home intrinsic or invented? If a southerner does not engage in the reverence of home that is such a celebrated part of southern identity, is self-exile the only viable alternative? Is it possible to identify more than one home, or is a multiplicity of homes the equivalent of homelessness? These questions about the literal home are paralleled by the questions Spencer’s work raises about her literary home: just as we may read “First Dark” as offering a subtle challenge to the traditionally recognized conventions of southern literature, Spencer’s career, a fifty-year period in which she has remained largely on the periphery of critical consciousness, speaks to the ways in which southern literature does not offer an entirely comfortable home for her. This study is rooted in these twin constructions of home: the southern home, a powerful, if fictive, notion that is central to southern identity, and the southern literary home, a structure that has, until quite recently, most easily accommodated white male writers and

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those who have shared their vision of the South and its literature. It is my belief that both of these notions of home, and the conservative tradition from which they stem, have undeniably shaped Elizabeth Spencer’s work. Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies, then, is an examination of the ways in which Spencer’s fiction interrogates these homes, and, in the process, remaps long-established landscapes of southern identity and southern literary production. In this project, I pair Spencer’s physical wanderings—which allowed her to create new homes outside of the South’s borders—with her artistic journey—in which she is able to reimagine the once-entrenched geographies of southern identity and to pose potent, if subtle, challenges to the orthodoxies of southern literature. By relying on Spencer’s fiction, her personal and biographical writings, and recent trends in southern theoretical scholarship, then, this study seeks to free Spencer’s work from ossified expectations of mid-century southern fiction—and the homes that arguably serve as its core—and to allow for the recasting of her unique position in the southern literary canon.

A New History: Reconsidering the Southern Canon Elizabeth Spencer’s “position” is, in fact, somewhat difficult to label. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that Spencer is a “forgotten” or “lost” writer, as critic Molly Haskell has noted in The New York Times Book Review, “too many people recognize the name of Elizabeth Spencer without quite knowing who she is” (7).1 Haskell observes that the faddish nature of American literary taste is in part to blame for Spencer’s absence from the literary foreground, but she also suggests that Spencer is “less well known than she ought to be . . . because she has a way of slipping through the nets we use to catch and categorize writers” (7). Certainly, Elizabeth Spencer resists simple categorization within the American literary canon. As Haskell and other Spencer critics note, it seems as if every “fact” of her career can be contested: she is a southern writer, born and raised in Mississippi, yet she has spent much of her adult life abroad, living and working in Italy and Canada; she is regularly celebrated as a short-story writer, yet she has published nine novels; and, finally, she is often identified as a “contemporary” writer, but her work spans more than fifty years. The publication of the 2001 Modern Library collection of Spencer’s short stories, The Southern Woman, and the Tony-Award-winning 2005 adaptation of her 1960 novella The Light in the Piazza as a

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Broadway musical have done a great deal to restore Spencer’s place in readers’ consciousness, essentially eclipsing Spencer’s paradoxical identity. Yet, her continued marginalization in the critical landscape is not as easily rectified: if she has been allowed to “slip through the nets” of the American canon, she has suffered even more greatly in terms of the more rigidly constructed southern canon. To some extent, Spencer’s wayward position within southern studies seems fairly improbable. Certainly, her pedigree as a “southern writer” is beyond question: she studied at Vanderbilt under Donald Davidson, and her work has been championed by both Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren among others. Yet, Spencer’s time in Nashville postdates the dispersion of Fugitive-Agrarian hegemony, making her difficult to place within the Vanderbilt lineage. Moreover, while some of Spencer’s work is engaged in southern history and culture, a good deal of her most acclaimed work is set abroad and often takes typically European themes and situations as its focus.2 Spencer’s long career further complicates her placement within the schema of southern studies: the granddaughter of a Civil War veteran, Spencer’s earliest work reaches back to the post-Reconstruction era, while her most recent novel, The Night Travellers, takes the Vietnam War as its subject. As a result, southern scholars and literary historians have tended to gloss over Spencer’s work or, perhaps more troublingly, to address it only fragmentally. Critics often insist upon reading Spencer as the heir to Eudora Welty’s legacy, focusing only on her most “southern” short stories. Or, conversely, they link her to contemporary southern writers, but then exclude her early work from their discussions. Thus, Spencer’s fiction is often miscontextualized, and many of her most problematic—and, I would argue, interesting—works have been overlooked. That Spencer is sometimes marginalized because she does not fit neatly within the recognized classifications of southern literary studies speaks to a larger problem within the field, one that has been at the center of academic discourse over the last few years. At the root of criticisms of southern literary scholarship is the belief that critics have been too eager to define southern literature in terms of its points of coherence; to that end, they traditionally have resisted notions of difference in favor of creating a single, consistent narrative. This may be best illustrated by scholars’ continued reliance upon an identification of the concerns and qualities of southern literature that date back to “the Rubin Generation,” as Lewis P. Simpson first termed southern scholars who began writing in the 1930s (250).3 Barbara Ladd, writing on the state of southern literary studies in a 2005 PMLA essay,

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catalogs this understanding of southern literature succinctly: she cites the continued centrality of “the social categories (family, community, place),” and explains that the traditional definition of southern literature goes something like this: southern literature is characterized by a strong sense of place, based on memory, insularity, and a tragic history of defeat in the Civil War (the South was taken to be white); southern literature expresses “universal” values of honor, chivalry toward women, gentleness with the subordinates (the South was taken to be male and privileged); concrete, enmeshed in all the peculiarities of place and lived history, southern literature is not reductive or abstract . . .; southern literature reflects the southern belief in evil, in the Fall, and in the limited efficacy of any progressivist or reform agenda. (1629)

This construction of southern literature—often reduced to “the importance of place, of the past, and of community”—is significant in a number of ways, the most considerable of which is, as Ladd suggests in her glossing of it, that it is informed by an elite, white male perspective: even as the canon has expanded to include works by women, African American writers, and other writers of color, these texts are often viewed as existing in a separate sphere—“southern women’s fiction” rather than “southern literature,” for example—or are considered only in terms of their overlap with the sorts of recognized categories that Ladd describes here. Admittedly, this same bias informed much early American literary scholarship, which was centered on a canon of almost exclusively white male writers for decades, but southern studies has been slower to embrace writers marginalized because of race and gender or to incorporate new theoretical approaches. In his book Inventing Southern Literature (1998), Michael Kreyling suggests that this is because “students and critics of southern literature . . . have been more rigorously schooled than others in the orthodox faith that our subject is not invented by our discussions of it but rather it is revealed by a constant southern identity” (ix). He argues that critics are conditioned to believe that southern literature is defined by a “formula as constant as the thing [the South] itself” and thus the objective of a great deal of scholarship has been to locate works within the existing paradigms (xi).4 Not only does this suggest that the current generation of scholarship may unconsciously replicate the biases of the earliest southern critics, but that we may be limited in our understanding of the way that the canon is expanding and shifting: as Donnalee Frega has argued, even though contemporary southern literature is

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marked by an influx of fresh talent, new writers are often compared to the canon’s central figures and are subject to “rigid ranking [that] allows for no new inquiry; new works are forever being judged against a canon which could not have anticipated innovations offered by contemporary authors” (14). The notion that One True South exists has long been discredited, even by the early critics who helped to perpetuate such a view.5 Yet, as Kreyling, Frega, and others have noted, the scholarly apparatus that supported a uniform view of the South and its literature still informs southern studies. While self-identified “revisionist” projects—studies that challenge conventional understandings of a consistent “mind of the South” and engage in a reexamination of the work of women and African American writers, for example—have actively reshaped the southern canon, they frequently remain dependent upon traditional notions of southern cultural and literary values. Thus, even when these projects recognize that so-called southern values might not be universally shared—that, for instance, women’s writing often subverts traditional southern ideals rather than celebrates them—they are often constrained by the patriarchal rhetoric that inscribes them. The result is that white, masculinist themes have continued to be central to our understanding of southern literature, and the structure of southern literary studies has remained largely intact. In the past several years, a number of studies have been published that have openly challenged the foundations of southern scholarship, and in doing so have made room for fresh readings of texts. In particular, by calling the structure of the canon into question, these studies relieve feminist critics of the task of inserting women into an existing model of southern literary history, and, instead, allow them to reconstruct that history so that women writers are fully accommodated. First among these works is Kreyling’s Inventing Southern Literature, published in 1998, which argues that the prevailing, Faulkner-centered view of southern literature was the creation of the Agrarians—and, later, their academic heirs—who actively sought to shape the understanding of the South to reflect their own political and aesthetic ideologies. Some of Kreyling’s claims are problematic, yet the study is remarkable in its stated insistence on making the politics of fiftysome years of scholarship transparent, and, in doing so, opening the doors to major revisions to the canon.6 Published just two years later, Patricia Yeager’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing (2000) goes even further in “dynamit[ing] the rails” of many of the major assumptions that underlie southern literary studies (34). One of the most compelling claims in the book is that southern

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scholars’ desire for a coherent construction of southern identity both neglects those who stand outside communal norms and creates what Yeager terms “the unthought known,” a privileging of white southern male identity to the exclusion of all others (xii). Yeager’s study, in contrast, chooses to focus on what she coins the “the throwaways” of southern literature, and she contends that southern literature is not about “community”—a shared, coherent identity—“but about moments of crisis and acts of contestation, about the intersection of black and white cultures as they influence one another and collide” (38). Yeager’s book, then, functions as a call to arms, demanding that scholars reconsider the invisible ways in which southern criticism privileges both whiteness and (male) heterosexual normativity.7 Yet if Kreyling’s and Yeager’s books function as critiques of the academy, there is also evidence of a shift in thinking about southern women writers within the academic mainstream. This may be most evident in The History of Southern Women’s Literature (2002), a sanctioned “addendum” to the Rubin Generation’s canon-defining (and now canonical) The History of Southern Literature (xv). The History of Southern Women’s Literature, which, rather significantly, shares many of its contributors with the original History, not only includes a broader range of writers than the original volume, but it endeavors to reconsider the traditional historical and thematic divisions that have defined southern literature. This is most notable, perhaps, in the section of the collection devoted to the Southern Renaissance, which, for the past fifty years, has been viewed as the bedrock of southern literary studies. The original History of Southern Literature dates the Renaissance from 1920 to 1950, loosely bracketing it with the world wars in accordance with Allan Tate’s “backward glance” theory of southern literary production. In The History of Southern Women’s Literature, however, this definition of the Renaissance is dismissed as “neat and convenient, but . . . hardly realistic” (Manning qtd in Perry and Weaks 233). The editors adopt the position that “the Southern Renaissance did not wait for World War I and the Fugitives and Agrarians at Nashville but dawned instead with scattered individuals, chiefly women, writing alone in the last decades of the ninetieth century” (Manning, “Southern Women Writers” 233–244). Accordingly, they date the Renaissance from 1900 to 1960, positioning Ellen Glasgow on one end and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor on the other. Thus, The History of Southern Women’s Literature demonstrates both that the dominant narratives that shape southern studies are not sacrosanct, and, as importantly, that southern literary history

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may be reconstructed not only to include women’s work, but to be defined in part by that work. In some ways, these works would seem to bear little influence in a reconsideration of Elizabeth Spencer’s work: Kreyling mentions Spencer only briefly, Yeager does not discuss her at all, and Spencer is identified in both Histories as a post-Renaissance (or “Second Renaissance”) writer.8 Yet, by challenging staid patterns of thinking about southern literature—and the work of women writers in particular—these studies invite a new reading of Spencer’s work, one that, for example, allows for the full consideration of the enormous pressure Spencer must have experienced as a fledgling writer in the wake of the Fugitive-Agrarians, whose construction of the South proscribed literary norms. And, while a great deal of Spencer’s work is undeniably engaged in “typically southern preoccupations”—a keen sense of place, the importance of the past, and the power of both family and community—we may see how as a mature writer she is able to challenge these categories, dismissed by Yeager as “ordinary,” and use them to create a unique vocabulary wholly independent from the southern literary tradition (ix). Finally, by viewing southern literary history as malleable rather than fixed, we can consider Spencer’s work in the context of a number of parallel traditions rather than merely viewing it in terms of the themes inscribed by male experience.

A New Terrain: Remapping the South If, as Kreyling argues in the conclusion of Inventing Southern Literature, “as southern studies develops . . . the impact of sexuality and gender will doubtless be the most important area of growth and change,” this emphasis is closely followed by the critical investigation of place (181–82). Place has always been central to a southern sense of self: any understanding of southern identity must begin with the recognition that the South is a meaningful construction and that its literal borders also function as significant metaphorical boundaries. Moreover, the notion of a fidelity to place—as illustrated in Faulkner’s staking out of his “postage stamp of native soil”—has been fundamental to the traditional readings of southern literature. Yet place has always been a somewhat troublesome concept in southern studies, at once immediate and abstract: while “a sense of place” is often held up as a criterion of a discrete southern literature, critics’ attempts to define “place” or its power often rely on increasingly conceptual language. For example, Eudora Welty’s 1956 essay “Place in Fiction”

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is often cited as the most enduring articulation of the importance of place not only to the writer’s imagination but to the southerner’s sense of self. But as Tonita Branan observes, Welty’s essay, which is “practically eulogize[d]” by critics such as Louis Rubin, Frederick Hoffman, and Noel Polk, “never advances a simple definition of its subject” (44). In fact, the essay often circles back on itself, inviting as many questions as it provides answers (44–45). For example, in a quotation from “Place in Fiction” cited by both Branan in her study and Hoffman in his influential 1961 essay “The Sense of Place,” Welty explains: “Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and there for credible, gathering-spot of all that has been felt, is to be experienced, in the novels’ progress. Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling of history partakes of place” (122). In Welty’s explanation, place is tightly inscribed: each element of place is intractably woven into the next. Yet, at the same time, Welty has created a definition that, because of its dependence on its own terms, assumes a familiarity if it is to be meaningful. Thus place becomes something “sacred,” a notion that is understood by “believers” but is not easily defined for outsiders.9 It is not surprising, then, that southern critics, spurred by recent theoretical developments in cultural geography, have begun to return to the issue of place in southern literature, questioning the traditional demarcation of southern spaces and the acceptance of the power of southern place.10 In doing so, the once sacrosanct boundaries of the South have become more porous, and investigations of southern place have expanded beyond the South’s literal borders. This reconsideration of space has two main components: critical studies that resituate the South within our understanding of American identity and those that have been termed “the new Southern Studies,” scholarship that repositions the South in a transnational context.11 As a whole, this work serves to complicate our understanding of the South, demanding that we see it, as Jon Smith explains, as “simultaneously center and margin, colonizer and colonized, global north and global south, [and] essentialist and hybrid” (145). “Place,” then, is no longer a certainty in critical considerations, but becomes fluid, and, as Scott Romine has observed, “If ‘sense of place’ has survived as a marker of southern literary identity, it has done so by surviving a radical shift in the assumption that originally enabled it” (32). My thinking about Spencer has been informed by an interest in these larger “radical shifts” rather than the more specific, and often fascinating, threads suggested by the New Southern Studies, but certainly claims such as

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Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer’s that “the U.S. South is not an enclave of hyperregionalism but a porous space through which other places have always circulated” are central to my reading of Spencer’s work (679). Whereas Spencer scholars previously have had to account for the anomalies in Spencer’s work—its multiple locales and Spencer’s own international relocations—recent criticism suggests that such “aberrations” may be the norm in southern literature if it is viewed outside of its traditional construction.12

Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies I believe, then, that in the wake of critical investigations of the onceinvisible margins of southern literature, Elizabeth Spencer’s work is ripe for reconsideration. As a result, this study is not an attempt to address all of Spencer’s major work—an undertaking successfully assumed both by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw in her insightful work Elizabeth Spencer (1985) and by Terry Roberts in his broadreaching Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer (1994)—nor is it an attempt to “reclaim” Spencer, who needs no such recovery.13 Instead, by focusing on a limited number of works that span Spencer’s long career, I hope to trace the multiplicity of “homes”—personal, professional, and artistic—that she has inhabited and to consider the ways in which they are reflected in her fiction. Indeed, the novels and stories I treat in this book speak to a dramatic evolution in Spencer’s oeuvre: as Spencer herself engages in various removes, her work also undergoes a series of technical and thematic relocations, and her treatment of the South as home becomes increasingly transgressive. This shift is evinced in Spencer’s earliest characters’ tendency to cling to the notion of the South as a talisman to protect them from complex and shifting matrices of identity; in her more mature fiction, however, her characters find the notion of the southern home to be an unreliable panacea and increasingly discover themselves to be geographically and spiritually adrift, defined by the uncertainty of destabilized identity rather than by their faith in southern tradition. Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies, then, argues that Spencer’s work relentlessly circles the sometimes-competing and continually fraught constructions of home that underlie twentieth-century southern literature, reconsidering them and ultimately recasting them in new ways. To this end, I have broken my study into four chapters, each of which addresses what may be identified as a “distinct phase” of

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Elizabeth Spencer’s development as a writer and that is critical to tracing Spencer’s shifting relationship to the South and her evolving position within the traditional southern literary canon. Chapter one, “ ‘A Sure Terrain’: Spencer’s Mississippi Novels,” serves as the biographical and critical basis for my study and explores the ways in which Spencer was indoctrinated in traditional constructions of southern identity during her Mississippi childhood and again at Vanderbilt. This chapter employs Spencer’s early biography primarily as a way of reconsidering the ways in which each of her three “Mississippi Novels”—Fire in the Morning (1948), This Crooked Way (1952), and The Voice at the Back Door (1956)—replicate the conventional notions of home that dominated her upbringing and initial publishing experiences, an accepted wisdom that invariably sacrificed an exploration of women’s experiences in favor of further consideration (and, at times, veneration) of a distinctly white, male vision of southern identity. While these novels may not represent Spencer’s most challenging work— they don’t display the sort of complex female character development that characterizes the novels and stories that follow them nor the technical innovation that marks her later fiction—they are, in fact, vital to tracing the evolution of Spencer’s thinking about home and to understanding the sorts of risks that she takes in her work after 1960. In tracking the development of Spencer’s voice in these novels, with a specific focus on the ambivalence with which she imbues her characters—and, tellingly, identifies in her own experiences as a writer—I seek to explore not only the Mississippi novels’ often-overlooked richness, but to identify the thematic and narrative threads that inform her later work. The second chapter, “Exploding the Can(n)on: The Light in the Piazza,” examines The Light in the Piazza (1960). The novella is arguably Spencer’s most popular work, primarily because it raises a number of intriguing questions in its depiction of the moral murkiness of an international marriage. Yet, The Light in the Piazza is also crucial in that it is a transitional work in Spencer’s oeuvre: if Spencer’s earliest work is located firmly within the southern literary tradition, The Light in the Piazza begins to question, and ultimately challenge, some of its inherent assumptions. Using postcolonial and feminist treatments of spatial identity, I argue that instead of depicting home as a tightly conscribed space, as she does in the Mississippi novels, in The Light in the Piazza Spencer uses an Italian setting as a way of exploring not only geographical but cultural and ideological displacement. The novella’s protagonist, Margaret Johnson, is a Winston-Salem housewife who, despite—or perhaps in response

INTRODUCTION

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to—her mentally disabled daughter, conforms neatly to the expectations of mid-century suburban southern womanhood; yet in Italy she feels free to recast herself as a more powerful, liberated figure. The novella, which rests on a Jamesian marriage plot, probes the various slippages and disjunctions that result when Margaret must confront the complexities created by the overlap in the identities she has adopted, and I argue that, ultimately, The Light in the Piazza suggests that a distinctly fluid notion of home—unimaginable in any of the Mississippi novels—may indeed be possible. Spencer’s later work continues to explore this expanded notion of home. The third chapter, “Inhabiting the Unhomely Moment in Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories,” traces these themes within Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories (1988), a small collection of Spencer’s mature short fiction. The collection further complicates Spencer’s identification as a southern writer: only two of its five stories are set in the South. Yet, while southern identity is not an overt preoccupation of most of the stories, the collection consistently challenges conventional notions of home by revealing the ways in which all of its protagonists must face the terror associated with “unhomeliness,” Homi Bhabha’s term for cultural disorientation. Thus the stories, while radically different in setting, characterization, and even technique, share a focus with one another, and, indeed, Spencer’s larger canon: each examines the ways in which the assumptions that underpin faith in a fixed home may be destabilized, and each tentatively explores the ways in which home may be reconstructed to become more fluid. “ ‘Radical’ Re-Envisionings of Home,” my final chapter, focuses on Spencer’s most recent—and, arguably, most complex—novel, The Night Travellers (1991), which abandons the familiar cultural and geographic landscapes of the American South and Europe and instead inhabits the shifting social and political terrain of America and Canada during the Vietnam War. The novel is unrelentingly restless in plot and structure: The Night Travellers follows a young woman, Mary Kerr Harbison, as she abandons the South and follows her antiwar activist lover into Canadian exile. Mary Kerr’s repeated physical relocations and spiritual dislocations are echoed in the novel’s fragmented form: The Night Travellers’ conventional narrative regularly is interrupted by a pastiche of journal entries, letters, and even transcripts of tape recordings. The novel, then, functions as a critical meditation on social, political, and, significantly, artistic itinerancy. In this chapter I argue that by relocating her southern characters to spaces that are defined by overt political and social upheaval, Spencer is able to examine the trope of the disrupted home in particularly

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fresh ways and, ultimately, to reimagine the South as a space of flux and possibility. Each of these chapters relies not only on close readings of the selected texts, but also examines the personal contexts and intellectual climates in which Spencer’s work was written. As almost all southern scholars agree, southern literature—perhaps more so than any other American literature—is shaped by enormous cultural forces, and Elizabeth Spencer’s work is no exception. To fully understand her evolving notion of southern identity, then, I seek to locate her work within a nexus of social and professional influence, and to this end I rely on primary as well as secondary sources, including Spencer’s published interviews and my conversations with her; her 1998 memoir, Landscapes of the Heart; correspondence from Spencer’s papers, housed at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa; and correspondence from the secondary collection of her papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well letters from the Louis Rubin and Walker Percy manuscript collections also held there.14 I believe that these documents are crucial not only to understanding Elizabeth Spencer’s history, but to exploring the ways in which this experience becomes the basis of reimaging imbricate notions of southern identity and southern women’s fiction. In short, they function as a “legend” of sorts for the complicated cartographies that Elizabeth Spencer regularly surveys in her work.

CH A P T ER

1

“A Sure Terrain”: Spencer’s Mississippi Novels

The 2001 publication of The Southern Woman, the Modern Library’s collection of Elizabeth Spencer’s short fiction, has served to clarify Spencer’s legacy, drawing the reader’s attention to Spencer’s complex and independent female protagonists. Indeed, Spencer’s literary reputation has been defined in large part by characters who display the same powerful will evinced in Frances Harvey in “First Dark”: we might think of Teresa Stubblefield, whose timidity hides a potent resolve that allows her to dismiss her obligations as a dutiful southern daughter in order to explore her own desires in “The White Azalea,” or Deborah Dale, the socially rebellious and sexually progressive protagonist of the widely celebrated story “The Girl Who Loved Horses,” who embraces marriage, and ultimately motherhood, but does so entirely on her own terms. In attempting to identify an overarching theme in Spencer’s stories, critic David Harvird rightly observes that Spencer’s heroines are almost universally defined by their “pursuit of an elusive élan vital” that inevitably “puts them at odds with a vast, extended southern family” (371). Yet, while the work that has cemented Spencer’s literary reputation—her short stories and later novels—can be characterized accurately as an exploration of female independence, her early novels are populated by women who are defined by their ambivalence rather than their autonomy; unlike Spencer’s later work, her first three novels, known as the “Mississippi novels”—Fire in the Morning (1948), This Crooked Way (1952), and The Voice at the Back Door (1956)—do not seem to challenge patriarchal hegemony, but instead situate themselves within a conservative, androcentric tradition. As a rule, these novels are obsessed with the past, and the novels’ central conflicts, which are often rooted in violence, are resolved through stoicism and community affirmation. In this way, Spencer’s early work is not “at

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odds with the southern family,” but, instead, embraces what Richard King has identified as “the southern family romance” (7). King’s term, which serves as the guiding metaphor for his 1980 study, A Southern Renaissance, is a problematic one in many respects, but remains useful for our consideration. Like most Southern Renaissance scholars, King views Renaissance writing as an attempt to reconcile the South’s past and its role in the modern world. His understanding of the Renaissance differs from his predecessors’ view primarily in that he sees the South’s modernization as marked not by protest or resignation, but by a troubled ambivalence. King argues that in order to address this ambivalence, writers regularly return to what he identifies as the locus of southern identity: the father. Thus, he contends that “the object of [Renaissance writers’] historical consciousness was a tradition whose essential figures were the father and the grandfather and whose essential structure was the literal and symbolic family,” and that “com[ing] to terms” with the “southern family romance” was the central preoccupation of the Southern Renaissance (7). This masculinist reading of the Renaissance has drawn a collective wince from feminist critics who decry King’s exclusion of women writers’ themes and concerns.1 [King defends the omission of women writers from his study with the rather outrageous claim that they “were not concerned primarily with the larger cultural, racial, and political themes” at the heart of the Renaissance (7).] Yet, while King’s generalizations represent a perilously outmoded approach to southern literary history, they are useful in a consideration of Elizabeth Spencer’s early novels in that they reflect critical attitudes that can be traced back to the Fugitive-Agrarians and that remained prevalent in the late 1940s and the 1950s, when Spencer was writing the Mississippi novels. Just as significant, however, is the fact that the Agrarian values that were codified and canonized at Vanderbilt were the same ideals that shaped Spencer’s upbringing in Carrollton, Mississippi. While the Southern Renaissance may have been an artistic and academic movement that sought to interrogate the South’s investment in an impossibly romanticized tradition, Spencer’s childhood was steeped in an acceptance of that very tradition. The mythic image of the white, often landed, patriarch that King sees as crucial to the Renaissance imagination was also central to Spencer’s earliest understanding of “home,” and, consequently, of southern identity. This chapter seeks, then, to identify the complex network of influences—familial, cultural, and academic—that shaped the writing of the Mississippi novels, works that celebrate the traditional patriarchal

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hierarchies that circumscribe home. Furthermore, I intend to trace the ways in which the anxiety of white womanhood is reflected in Spencer’s early female characters, most of whom are preoccupied with the distinctly masculine formations of southern identity and cultural inheritance that comprise the southern home. In doing so, I hope to reject the perception of these novels as simply the “immature” work of a young writer and, instead, to explore the powerful influences that shaped Spencer’s early work and thus to foreground the dramatic shifts in her later fiction.

A Sure Terrain: Teoc and Carrollton In the short story “A Southern Landscape,” Elizabeth Spencer’s youthful protagonist, Marilee Summerall, blithely recounts the drunken escapades of Foster Hamilton, arguably the most dashing drunk in the town of Port Claiborne, Mississippi. In the story’s closing lines, Marilee draws a parallel between Foster and Windsor, a stately antebellum mansion that has been left to decay, and explains that while their mutual decline is in some ways unfortunate, it is also predictable and thus comforting. She concludes by observing, “There have got to be some things you can count on, would be an ordinary way to put it. I’d rather say that I feel the need of a land, of a sure terrain, a sort of permanent landscape of the heart” (52). This line evokes the power of memory, and it generated the title of Spencer’s 1998 memoir, Landscapes of the Heart; however, Marilee’s observation is also significant in its suggestion of the ways in which tradition and place are inextricably linked. The story’s conclusion intimates that the presence of tradition, rather than the relative value of that tradition, is at the heart of defining a place. That manners and mores may be corrosive, as both Windsor and Foster Hamilton demonstrate, is made inconsequential by their power to define boundaries and to identify those who belong within them. This investment in the incontrovertible power of tradition is, in many ways, central to our most basic understanding of the southern sense of self: in effect, a southerner is someone who identifies on an immediate level with a geographic region, and this literal mapping of the self is overlaid by a series of values and customs that are particular to that place. In his study The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (1999), however, Scott Romine debunks the myth that these values are somehow organic to the community or are the natural outgrowth of a common self-perception. Instead, he demonstrates that, in part, southern identity is made fixed—or formed into a “sure terrain,” as

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Marilee identifies it—by the often self-conscious reinforcement of existing boundaries and the reification of traditional hierarchies; he argues that, in short, “insofar as it is cohesive, a community will tend to be coercive” (2). The southern home, then, is not merely a space where a hegemonic identity is evinced, but where it is forged and fortified. Yet, the transparency of the South’s construction makes southern identity no less powerful. As Richard Gray argues in his introduction to the collection South to a New Place (2002), we must be cautious in considering the South from a postmodern subjectivity. We are now trained, perhaps, to equate “imagined communities” with invention, and, by extension, inauthenticity, yet Gray neatly inverts our critical skepticism by arguing that “what [southern communities] have in common is the act of imagination . . . and what all members of those communities share, in turn, is . . . the need to make a place in the world with the aid of talk and ceremony, language and communal ritual” (xxiii). “Making a place,” then, is not simply a stubborn adherence to a mythic identity; instead, we see it as the act of regenerating a shared self. In such an understanding, the South—as both a geographical space and a spiritual home—is a legitimate, meaningful construction, an important locus of identity and a point of transference of southern values. This belief is made manifest not only in Spencer’s fiction, but is evident in a particularly dramatic fashion in her early biography as well. Certainly, critics have been quick to point out that in the midtwentieth century, traditional southern values, which originated in a mythic image of the Old South, seemed less vital than they had even a generation earlier, yet Elizabeth Spencer’s fairly extraordinary childhood belied the era in which she lived. While she was born in 1921, after the end of World War I and during the early years of the South’s push toward Modernism, Spencer’s childhood seems improbably anachronistic. One reviewer of Landscapes of the Heart remarked that Spencer “lived her early years very much like the child of a 19th century gentleman farmer,” an experience that seems surprising even in rural Mississippi, an insular region deemed “the most southern place on earth” (S. Smith, par. 4, Cobb vii). Spencer divided her time between Carrollton, Mississippi, a small hill town, and Teoc, her maternal family’s Delta plantation, and she identifies both places as possessing a chivalric form of self-identification common to the Old South rather than what Daniel Joseph Singal identifies as the “post-Victorian” sensibility that defined much of the South in the early twentieth century (37). Spencer explains that in Carrollton, “behavior and manners came to us from an eighteenth-century code of life. People in Carrollton

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often seem to have stepped out of Jane Austen. Authorities from the past stood out in austere ranks—the Bible, the Romans, the Greeks. Our finest houses looked like classical temples. Our lawyers quoted Cicero. Our ministers knew Hebrew” (Landscapes 34). Thus, a reverence of aristocratic mythology and an adherence to the Cavalier code surrounded Spencer throughout her childhood.2 This antebellum conception of southern identity was even more dramatic at Teoc, Spencer’s mother’s family’s plantation. Teoc was the site of Spencer’s happiest memories as a child, and much of this is credited to the time she spent there with her maternal grandfather, John S. McCain, who exemplified southern manhood for Spencer. Spencer’s adoration of her grandfather is evident throughout her memoir, and her depiction of him is often cloaked in the language of myth; in her telling, John McCain seems larger than life—even those qualities that she recognizes as “flaws” seem to be merely the inevitable result of a faithful interpretation of the southern heroic ideal. For example, she explains that McCain, who was born in 1851, attempted to enroll in the Confederate Army as a young boy: “He tried to enlist for service, saying (the one lie ever attributed to him) that he was eighteen, but no one believed him” (Landscapes 10). John McCain’s attempt to enlist is an example of what historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has labeled “primal honor,” a tradition of public valor that is central to the construction of southern manhood and that articulates not only personal bravery, but also functions as a form of community identification (34). Thus, it is not surprising that although he was spurned by the army, John returned to Teoc and found honor in the region as a successful planter and, years later, as a county sheriff.3 Spencer depicts the succeeding generations of McCains as following the warrior/planter model established by John and his brothers Joseph McCain, a Civil War veteran, and Henry Pinkney McCain, who Spencer reports “was said to have fathered the draft act” and was a general in World War I (13). John’s oldest son, William, went to West Point and served in World War I while his second son, John Sidney, went to Annapolis and served as an admiral during World War II.4 Joseph, the youngest son, took over the operation of Teoc. Thus, each generation of McCain men situated themselves within a paradigm of masculinity based on the ideals of the Old South, privileging the Cavalier ideal and a sense of rugged southern honor. In Landscapes of the Heart, Spencer seems to measure the McCain men against an invisible checklist of the expectations of the southern planter, illustrating in particular her grandfather’s and uncle Joe’s

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stoicism, bravery, patient paternalism, and enduring reverence for the land in a series of vignettes. Perhaps the most powerful of these is an incident in which Spencer, a young girl at the time, was riding a horse that became frightened and bolted toward a locked gate. Her grandfather “ran from the chair in the front, through the house to the back yard. As we plunged into the stretch, there he stood before us, right in the path of the horse, his arms raised and waving . . . I never forgot the sight, a life risked to save me, without an instant’s debate, hesitation, or fear” (17). Here, for Spencer, the romantic image of the southern man of honor is fully embodied. The McCain women were equally invested in the Cavalier ideal, although unlike the McCain men, who were defined by action, Spencer depicts the McCain women as shaped by imagination. She explains that one of her maternal grandmother Elizabeth’s prized possessions was a complete set of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and she credits her mother, Mary James McCain Spencer, a music teacher, for instilling in her a love of literature and art: in almost every discussion of her childhood, Spencer recalls the joys of her mother reading aloud to her. Yet, like her grandmother’s dedication to Scott, the narratives that Mary selects are telling: Spencer explains that she was enchanted by “imaginative stories and fairy tales, Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, the pictures of Roman legionnaires in the Latin books, ladies in long draped robes, King Arthur stories, [and] Robin Hood” (Landscapes 15).5 Each of the stories pays homage to the models for the southern chivalric code, and, in doing so, reinforces images of male daring and female passivity. As many southern historians have pointed out, however, while the feudal model at the center of these narratives was crucial to southern self-fashioning in the post-Reconstruction era, it left very little room for women to maneuver: in addition to granting agency to men, the Cavalier ideal depended on a construction of southern womanhood that rarely reflected the realities of daily life.6 In her seminal work on southern women’s fiction, Tomorrow is Another Day (1981), Anne Goodwyn Jones posits that the ideal of the southern lady does not privilege women’s humanity, but is based on “a marble statue, beautiful and silent, eternally inspiring and eternally still” (4). She explains that to exemplify the values of white southern womanhood, a woman must be pious, chaste, and “[f]inally, she must serve others—God, husband, family, society—showing in her submissiveness the perfection of pure sacrifice. Ironically, this model of perfection cannot stand alone; she needs Christ for salvation and, on earth, the pedestal of male economic support and the protection of the walls of a southern

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gentleman’s home” (9). Spencer’s depiction of her mother is very much aligned with the paradox of white womanhood that Jones describes: Mary Spencer was responsible for raising her family, yet she deferred to her husband and the church—in this case, Presbyterian—in all important matters. She emerges in Spencer’s memoir as little more than a sketch, a quiet woman who “often wore white” because her husband “loved the virginal look of it,” and who “saw the Hand of the Lord everywhere” (Landscapes 51; Phillips 128). This image of a warm, yet pristine and obedient woman was never disrupted; even when Spencer battled with her father in adulthood over her decision to become a writer, an impulse that Mary Spencer had, to some extent, cultivated in her daughter, Mary remained silent, refusing to contradict her husband or the traditional southern values he espoused. While Spencer expresses muted frustration with her mother in her description of these later incidents in Landscapes of the Heart, she never overtly identifies the limited position Mary Spencer occupies or acknowledges the ways in which the southern construction of the masculine ideal defines Mary’s role. Such an omission is impossible in her discussion of race, however; her descriptions of Teoc, in particular, acknowledge the ways in which the Cavalier ideal was dependent upon the subjugation of African Americans. Given her admiration for the McCain men, however, it is not surprising that her discussion of the plantation’s black population is marked by contradictions, slippages, and ambiguities. Spencer’s ambivalence is clearly seen in an early reference to the role of African Americans at Teoc: Yet it was an ugly system, of course, enslaving, grown up after slavery and not possible, apparently, ever to lose. But in that childhood time of enchantment and love, it never seemed to me anything but part of the eternal. Might as well question why the live oaks were there, or the flowers in Aunt Esther’s garden, or the stars in the sky, as to say that Teoc could be run any way but the way it was, always had been, and always would be. I myself was a slave more willing than any. (Landscapes 33)

Her rhetoric here is interesting in that it denies her family’s agency in the “ugly system” inscribed by cheap black labor, and diminishes its “ugliness” by equating it with the natural imagery of trees, flowers, and stars. Yet, at the same time that Spencer identifies the subjugation of blacks as seeming both natural and eternal, she calls attention to this view as one held by her childhood self, subtly suggesting her own naïveté and calling her account into question.

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Undeniably, however, the most compelling rhetorical move in this passage is Spencer’s curious self-identification as a slave. Spencer never worked on the plantation with the African American field hands; instead, she spent many summers riding horses around Teoc with her uncle, Joe McCain, who managed the plantation after John McCain’s death. She flourished under his encouragement, and she credits him with listening to her carefully, even when she was a child (Landscapes 25). In her memoir, she notes that the black plantation workers also viewed Joe as thoughtful and fair, and she recalls instances in which he mediated disagreements between them or helped them with financial problems. In this way, Spencer seems to be equating the position of “slave” with her devotion to her uncle, and thus, she defines a slave as the recipient of paternalistic benevolence rather than a person who is viewed as property. This view is further supported by her discussion of race in her memoir: I’ve tried to think back, tried earnestly to remember if there were evidences of bad feeling between my uncle and the many black people, descendants of the original slaves, for the most part, who worked the land, lived on it year round, and were furnished out of the [family] store. As best I can recall, they were exceptionally good humored around him in a way that seemed to make their dependency a reassurance to them rather than a burden. I can’t to this day believe that I would not have noticed any deep-seated animosity. (Landscapes 30)

Spencer largely sidesteps the ethical questions surrounding the role of blacks at Teoc by underscoring their place within an established southern hierarchy, one in which white, landed men held positions of power. Thus, Spencer’s reverence for the masculine ideal exemplified by the McCain men is pervasive throughout her autobiographical writing, including her discussions of the limited roles afforded white women and African Americans. Yet, if Teoc was defined for Spencer by her grandfather’s and uncle’s powerful, yet affectionate, presence, Carrollton, which functioned as Spencer’s more permanent childhood home, was inscribed in large part by her father’s purposeful authoritarianism. In many ways, her father, James Luther Spencer, was not unlike the McCain men: Spencer speculates that her mother was attracted to him because of a “Victorian admiration for strength and worthiness in men,” traits that were venerated at Teoc (Landscapes 59). Furthermore, she identifies Luther as “a person of community spirit,” a quality that Wyatt-Brown identifies as the sine qua non of southern

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gentility (Landscapes 51; 90). Yet, unlike the McCains, Luther was not a planter or soldier, but a businessman who committed himself (generally very successfully) to a variety of disparate projects, including a car dealership, a gas station, and a cotton gin (Prenshaw, ES 4).7 Within the rubric of what Joseph Daniel Singal has identified as “the New Model Capitalist,” Luther was asked to straddle the line between the ruthlessness associated with capitalist practices in the North and the ideal of paternalism that dictated Cavalier behavior, and Elizabeth Spencer notes that Luther was recognized for his generosity, regularly providing loans or employment to friends. Yet she also suggests that Luther seemed to interpret the paternalistic code quite literally, and was largely divorced from the romantic ideals Spencer associated with Teoc. For instance, while books were central to life at Teoc, Luther Spencer had little patience for anything that “could not make money” and thus he articulated a disdain for anything of an artistic nature (51). Spencer explains that “[h]e believed that made-up stories, poems, paintings, and so on through the whole lexicon of artistic endeavor were simply foolishness, a waste of time, all right for women to indulge within limits, he supposed, but out of the question for a real man to take seriously” (51). Thus, Luther Spencer dismissed the cultural components of southern gentility that were central to the masculine ideal apparent at Teoc. Luther’s reading of masculinity, then, was less expansive than the McCains’ and was tied instead only to measurable qualities such as strength, productivity, and social success. Of course, Luther Spencer’s rejection of art and literature can also be read as an offhanded dismissal of the talents and tastes of Mary, a music teacher, and Elizabeth, a writer, and perhaps it is not surprising that as Spencer’s commitment to her work grew, her relationship with her father deteriorated. Luther Spencer had always been a difficult man—Spencer identifies him as possessing a “bad temper” and explains that he believed himself to be “an authority on everything within five minutes after he heard it”—however, Spencer had a generally good relationship with him as a child (Broughton 150; Landscapes 51). But as she grew older and deviated from his expectations, Luther Spencer grew more rigid in his rejection of her decisions, and more dramatic in his displays of disapproval. As a result, it is impossible to read Spencer’s memoir, interviews, and personal papers without becoming acutely aware of the pain that their troubled relationship caused her, even in Luther’s final years when the two were fundamentally estranged. Yet, despite Spencer’s problematic relationship with Luther Spencer, it is clear from her autobiographical writing that her earliest understanding

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of home was profoundly shaped by both her relationship with her father and with her de facto fathers, John and Joe McCain. Both at the Spencer home in Carrollton and at Teoc, their interpretation of the South’s traditional hierarchies granted Spencer an understanding of an ordered world, one in which her place was clearly fixed and, consequently, unquestionably secure. Thus, despite the fact that Spencer never embraced the role proscribed for her in such a paradigm, it was impossible for her to fully reject the patriarchal construction of home that had been conveyed to her by her father, uncle, and grandfather and that would later be reinforced by Donald Davidson and the other Fugitive-Agrarians.

A Familiar Landscape: Nashville When Elizabeth Spencer first left Carrollton, she moved almost a hundred miles away to Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. Yet, as Spencer notes, “in some important respects, I never left home at all” (Landscapes 160). Belhaven, a conservative Presbyterian college, was headed by a relative of her father’s by marriage, and these factors ensured that the same messages that had defined Spencer’s life in Carrollton were “drummed once again in girlish ears” (160). While on one hand Belhaven was a new place in which Spencer, like most college students, could experiment with an identity independent of her family, it ultimately retained the many of values and flavors of home, and Spencer has wryly described her four years at Belhaven as “an incarceration” (Roberts, “The South and Beyond” 208). Belhaven’s most important function for Spencer, then, was as an entrée to a larger world. Almost every biographical sketch of Spencer mentions that it was at Belhaven that she met Eudora Welty, whom Spencer had invited to speak to a student literary group. The encounter resulted in a lifelong friendship, a relationship that has become embedded in Spencer “lore” and that is employed by many critics to locate Spencer within the southern literary canon.8 Yet, while Spencer’s relationship with Welty, one of the most recognized southern women writers of the twentieth century, would be immensely important to Spencer both personally and professionally, Spencer’s path was more immediately shaped by the sort of “gentlemanly politics” that had marked life in Teoc and Carrollton. James Moody McDill was a Vanderbilt PhD teaching in the English program at Belhaven, and he took an early interest in Spencer; it was on his recommendation that she ultimately was accepted to attend Vanderbilt as “a favored student” in 1942 (Landscapes 169). McDill’s endorsement was not necessarily critical

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to Spencer’s admission to Vanderbilt—Spencer’s impressive undergraduate record suggests that she would not have had trouble securing a spot—but it was essential in introducing Spencer to Donald Davidson, and, by extension, the Fugitive-Agrarians, long recognized as tight-knit fraternity.9 Spencer was acutely aware of both the exclusive nature of the group and of their influence as writers, critics, and editors. Despite the fact that the Fugitive-Agrarians no longer existed as a cohesive group— after 1937 Donald Davidson was the only member who remained in Nashville—Vanderbilt remained the group’s symbolic home, and in coming to Nashville, Spencer was determined to stake a place within what was already a legendary tradition. She explains that: What I had come for was something less visible [than the University itself] but in literary circles more famed. The Vanderbilt Fugitives, later known as the Agrarians, had had their beginnings here, and their word seemed nothing less than the Word. Spreading outward, it had become the law in the world of modern letters. The great names— John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson—cast a shadow that had nothing in common with coal smoke [which surrounded Nashville.] Here one entered an ambiance rather like that of a sacred grove. (Landscapes 173)

To be in Nashville in 1942 was to stand at what was once the epicenter of literary criticism, and the shockwaves were still felt in the years after Tate, Warren, and Ransom left. Spencer explains that the Fugitive-Agrarians, especially Tate, were afforded “awed regard everywhere,” and “[j]ust as The Waste Land was endlessly unraveled as to nuance, source, and meaning in hundreds of student papers, so the latest poem of Warren or Ransom was to be pondered and dissected, the latest critical article passed around” (174). This observation carries with it a small degree of irony in its intimation of the Fugitives’ early days, when T.S. Eliot’s work, which was not yet widely known, was championed by Tate and became the subject of many of the group’s discussions. Thus, the substitution of Warren and Ransom for Eliot in Spencer’s account of graduate student life at Vanderbilt underscores the influence that the Fugitive-Agrarians possessed. To be Donald Davidson’s student, then, was to absorb some of the magic that was associated with the group; enrolling in any of his classes was an invitation to eavesdrop on the discussion that had shaped the American literary canon and that continued to define southern literature. Recognition as a “favored student” offered a means of actually joining that conversation.

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It is little surprise that the pressure to please Davidson was immense. Spencer writes in her memoir that she literally shook in his presence, and she identifies herself as his “humble worshipper” (Landscapes 174, 179). Yet, despite her anxiety, Davidson’s “sermons” were not wholly unfamiliar, but rather echoed the values and mores that had permeated Teoc and Carrollton. Like Spencer’s grandfather and uncle, Davidson was invested in the power of land and the continuity of traditional hierarchies, notably those that privileged white men. And, like her father, Davidson demanded absolute compliance in these views. Spencer explains that “Disagreement from a student on some basic issue to his thinking—socialism, for example, or racial equality, or ‘progress’—brought a response as if to blasphemy” (176). Davidson ultimately evolved into a father figure for Spencer, a role that was particularly important as her relationship with her own father deteriorated, yet in many ways he was as exacting as Luther Spencer. He saw himself as a self-described “Warder of the Gate,” believing, as Spencer explains, that “[w]hat is taught reaches through to minds that, once set right, have a chance of staying right” (177). This type of rigid adherence to a single perspective was most pronounced in Davidson, but it also marked the thinking of the group’s other members—Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren—who, while “firmly maintaining their own opinions,” as Cleanth Brooks asserts, were bound by their similar backgrounds and beliefs (24).10 It is, in fact, their consistently conservative views—a spectrum defined by Davidson’s traditionalist polemics on one end and Tate’s interpretation of Modernism on the other—that allows for an identification of “the Fugitive-Agrarian mind.” Any such label is problematic, however, and the perils inherent in this classification are particularly evident in the critical tendency to collapse the two groups’ distinct projects, one a formal consideration of poetic aesthetics, undertaken by the Fugitive group from 1922 to 1926, and the other an exploration of the social, economic, and spiritual questions raised by the South’s push toward Modernism, articulated by the Agrarians in their controversial manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand (1930).11 One of the tasks of intellectual historians who use the term “Fugitive-Agrarian,” then, is to identify continuities within these concerns. For feminist critics, one of the most significant threads that links the Fugitive and Agrarian projects is an assertion of the dominance of the male intellect, and, as importantly, a dismissal of work that might be deemed “feminine.” In writing about I’ll Take My Stand, Carol Manning observes that, to some extent, the Fugitive-Agrarians’ phallocentric focus

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is predictable; she acknowledges that the collection’s “sexism is an understandable product of its authorship by twelve men who were themselves products of their time and place” (“Agrarianism” 69). Yet she notes that, ultimately, I’ll Take My Stand’s consistent omission of women is in violation of the project’s aims; it is inconceivable, she contends, to overlook the role of women when the essays’ purpose is to “[promote] agrarianism as a way of life in which the family thrives, each member having a meaningful role” (69). In her essay “Gender, Race, and Allen Tate’s Profession of Letters in the South,” Susan Donaldson posits that this omission of women can be traced back to the masculine ideals that guided the thinking of the Old South. She locates the Fugitive-Agrarians within a traditional construction of southern identity in which “masculine identity was dependent partly upon the proper subordination of inferiors, like blacks and women, and partly upon the regard of male cohorts” (495). In short, unless they wrote for an audience of men about a world defined by masculine power, male writers risked “losing their very standing as white men in a paternalistic stratified society” (498). Feminist critics agree that, at least in part, it was this permutation of southern honor that drove the Fugitive-Agrarians not only to exclude women from their worldview, but to attempt to expunge any distinctly feminine aesthetic from their work and, in fact, to strive to write in ways that might alienate a female audience. Essentially, the Fugitives were determined to write against the popular antebellum tradition defined by women writers such as E.D.E.N. Southworth and Augusta Evans, which Tate identified as “the unreal union of formless revery [sic] and correct sentiment” (“Profession” 526).12 This resolution may be seen clearly in the Fugitives’ early considerations of the ideal qualities of poetry. Critic Katherine Hemple Prown explains that in attempting to construct a theory of poetry, the Fugitives “reject[ed] aesthetic principles based on beauty, melancholy, sentiment, and gentility,” seeking instead to ground their poetry in European models. This move represented an upheaval of traditional notions of southern literature, Prown argues. She claims that “[b]y linking these aesthetic principles to a female audience, the group was able to lay the foundation for a new aesthetic, one founded on the rejection of the feminine” (27). This “new aesthetic” was evident not only in the vanquishing of the sentimental, but in the addition of “misogynistic references to female treachery” and the fetishization of the dead female body as consistent themes in Fugitive poetry (32). In this way, the Fugitives’ work could be identified as what it was not—that is, “genteel”—as much as it could be by what it actually was.

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This celebration of the masculine ideal can also be traced through the 1930s and 1940s as the Agrarians, in their roles as critics and editors, sought to define the literary flowering that would come to be known as the Renaissance. As Michael Kreyling has observed, “the group that succeeds in naming the system . . . controls who will seek entrance to or maintenance within it,” and the Agrarians’ image of the Renaissance as “a literature conscious of the past in the present,” as Tate identified it, shaped the Renaissance around male writers’ concerns (7; Tate, “New Provincialism” 545). In his defining essay “The New Provincialism” (1945), Tate lists four women writers as “traditionalists,” or exemplars of his “backward glance” thesis: Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, and Ellen Glasgow. Yet, Tate’s centerpiece, and, indeed, the dominant figure of the Renaissance, was William Faulkner, whom Tate identifies as “the most powerful and original novelist in the United States” (545). This veneration of Faulkner, which became more entrenched over time, solidified the southern literary ideal as overtly masculine, if not misogynistic.13 Thus, southern women writers of the mid-twentieth century would have been shaped by the Fugitives-Agrarians’ phallocentric aesthetic and thematic standards; as a rule, they must have understood that to refuse to adopt the literary conventions championed by the FugitiveAgrarians was to ensure the casual dismissal extended to “regional” or “sentimental” writers or, equally as damaging, to risk being labeled as “dangerous radicals.” In her compelling study of Flannery O’Connor, for instance, Katherine Hemple Prown demonstrates that not only did O’Connor carefully adhere to the Fugitive-Agrarian aesthetic, but that she actively was coached by Caroline Gordon, her mentor (and Allen Tate’s wife), to “write like a man” (77). Unlike O’Connor, Elizabeth Spencer did not receive such explicit direction. While she asked Davidson for his “blessing” before beginning work on her first novel—which, tellingly, he granted after advising her that getting married would be a wiser course of action—she did not share her earliest drafts of the novel with him (Landscapes 196). Thus the majority of the Fugitive-Agrarians’ influence on her own writing would be limited to her understanding of their theories as they were conveyed during her graduate experience. Yet this understanding, too, would have differed from O’Connor’s or any of the other of the Fugitive-Agrarians’ female protégées’ in that Spencer worked most closely with Davidson, whose interpretation of the Fugitive-Agrarian mandate veered more aggressively to the right than Tate’s, Ransom’s, and Warren’s.14

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At the center of Davidson’s vision was the “autochthonous ideal,” a term he introduced in his 1926 essay “The Artist As Southerner.” In this essay, he depicts southern writers as trapped between two models, antebellum sentimentalism and modern industrialism. He likens the modern southern writer’s appropriation of the sentimental model to a “flapper . . . [in] hoopskirts,” and views an attempt to embrace industrialism as equally disingenuous (782). Thus, he contends, southern writers must write of the South as home, an intimately recognizable place, rather than an entity that may be judged. In his essay “Why the Modern South Has a Great Literature,” Davidson clarifies this point by explaining that southern writers seem to have an innate connection with the South and a sense of the form that belongs to the subject matter. I do not know how to explain this except by saying that the person who is born of a traditional society, if he is not corrupted, will act as a whole person in all his acts, including his literary acts . . . His apprehension of his subject matter, which is intuitive and comes from “knowledge carried to the heart,” moves hand in hand with his compassion, which derives from his intellectual judgment, his sense of fitness and order. (176)15

Attempts to capture the South by a writer who is outside its “traditional society” or is not a “whole person” are doomed, Davidson suggests, and are marked by “false knowledge that brings imitation, subservience, and distortion” (179). Thus, Spencer contends that her initial naïveté upon her arrival at Vanderbilt made her a particularly attractive student to Davidson, rather than putting her at a disadvantage. She writes that “he could see me as a well-brought up but totally unsophisticated small-town girl of a farming family, and he could approve of that; and furthermore, only he could positively rejoice in my being able to excel not in spite of but because of this upbringing” (Landscapes 179–180; emphasis Spencer’s). Her conception of the South as home—one rooted in traditional hierarchies and centered on her family’s plantation—was a reflection of Davidson’s autochthonous ideal. Yet, while Davidson’s conception of southern writers as organic extensions of their environment was one that rejected a nostalgic view of the Old South, Davidson’s own views, particularly regarding race, were often located within that tradition. Michael O’Brien explains that almost all of the Agrarians had “mixed feelings about slavery,” primarily viewing it as an embarrassment, and thus “they did not make it central to their view of the Old South” (25).16 Davidson, on the

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other hand, saw the supremacy of whites as central to southern identity, and this view litters his later writings. One of the most notable examples is in his essay “Still Rebels, Still Yankees” (1938), which, as Richard King notes, is “an otherwise bucolic evocation of rural Georgia and Jeffersonian virtue” (60); yet, in one passage, Davidson writes: “Lynchings, the work of hotheads and roustabouts, were regrettable; but what did a few lynchings count in the balance against the continual forbearance and solicitude that the Georgian felt he exercised toward the amiable children of cannibals, whose skins by no conceivable act of Congress or educational program could be changed from black to white” (241). This question, presumably one that would be voiced by a Georgian, reveals Davidson’s own racism as well as his pronounced mistrust of both sociologists and the federal government (206). As Fred Hobson has explained, Davidson believed that sociology “was committed to changing and reforming [southerners], to taking the color and vitality out of their lives and reshaping them in the standardized American mold”; in this view, the government, in acting on sociologists’ recommendations, became an agent for replacing southern tradition with its antitheses, “the abstract, the theoretical, and the scientific” (Tell About the South 180). Thus race and the field of sociology are intimately linked in Davidson’s view of what he called “Leviathan,” and his work is marked by a fear of what he perceived as the artificial elevation of blacks in white southern society. Davidson’s views were made manifest in his classroom in the years in which Spencer attended Vanderbilt: Spencer recalls numerous instances in which Davidson characterized African Americans as children, and she cites, in particular, his admiration for the Walt Disney adaptation of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, Song of the South, a film that infamously depicts black servitude as idyllic (Landscapes 176). In many ways, these views did not dramatically conflict with Spencer’s understanding of race relations at Teoc, yet Davidson’s continued insistence on the supremacy of white culture and the dangers of Leviathan made many of his students, including Spencer, uncomfortable. She recalls his lectures on the dangers of the standardization of southern culture as marked by genuine hatred rather than academic passion, “and when he hated,” she explains, “he grew enraged, eyes flashing, voice harshly polemical” (176). In a 1990 interview, she explained, “We didn’t understand the fanaticism. We understood the brilliant side of Donald Davidson and we regarded it highly, but his fanatical approach to the South we resented in some ways. [Yet,] we had no desire to quarrel openly with any of [the Fugitive-Agrarians]” (Roberts, “A Whole Personality” 210).

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Thus, Spencer came to understand the Fugitive-Agrarians’ mandate through the lens of Davidson’s uncompromisingly conservative views: the duty of the southern writer was to explore the “traditional society” of the South as home, rejecting any sort of objective assessment of its culture that might be associated with “the regime of false knowledge” perpetuated by the social sciences (“Modern South” 179). Spencer’s proximity to the Fugitive-Agrarians during some of her most formative years—in graduate school, as she was being exposed to new works and ways of thinking about literature, and in the years that followed, as she began writing her first novel—put her in a relatively unique position: their views virtually dominated her early understanding of literature and the role of the southern writer. Initially, Spencer’s experience as one of the Fugitive-Agrarians’ “favored students” does not seem uncommon: as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have demonstrated in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), for example, almost all women writers work in a tradition that is circumscribed by a patriarchal heuristic. Because she was “coming of age” as an author in a period in which this patriarchal tradition was both particularly rigid and all-encompassing, however, her early growth as a writer deviates from the paradigm Gilbert and Gubar establish. Central to their thesis is the theory that women writers suffer not from the “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has called it, a period of development in which a writer must vanquish his literary forefather, but from the “anxiety of authorship,” which Gilbert and Gubar describe as “a radical fear that [the female artist] cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate or destroy her” (49).17 In response, Gilbert and Gubar argue, women writers consciously seek female precursors, writers who will “[prove] by example that a revolt against patriarchal literacy is possible” (49). Over the past twenty-five years, southern literary critics have taken up the project of identifying female lineages within the southern literary tradition, and, specifically, female mentoring relationships that would have provided a foundation for such a “revolt,” and Spencer’s relationship with Welty is often heralded as a model of female mentoring.18 Yet while Spencer has expressed appreciation for a number of women writers, including Welty, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf, she does not characterize these writers as models for her own work and, in fact, explicitly rejects the characterization of Welty as a mentor. She states that “Eudora was never a ‘mentor.’ In the course of a long friendship I learned a lot from her observations and from her experience with New York, publishing, etc. As for advice and support,

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she and [Robert Penn] Warren were indeed helpful in praising my work, supporting me in applications, etc. But I thought of them both as friends” (“Questions”). In her foreword to The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1983), Welty echoes this characterization of their relationship, explaining that while “Elizabeth offered me my first chance to give literary advice . . . my instincts protected us both,” and “instead of advising each other, we became friends” (xiii–xiv).19 To argue that Welty was not a model in some ways for Spencer, least of all in her defiance of many of the Fugitive-Agrarian conventions, would be imprudent, but it is important to note that Spencer did not identify her relationship with Welty—or any other female writer—in these terms.20 And while Spencer’s papers reveal that she and Welty read and responded to one another’s published work, there is no evidence they shared drafts of their work with one another or otherwise took an active role in shaping one another’s literary sensibility.21 Thus, while Welty may have provided an oblique, yet important, model for Spencer, neither she nor other women writers could offer a meaningful counterbalance to the powerful sway of the FugitiveAgrarians. In the early years of Spencer’s career, Welty published some of her most famous work; yet even as one of the South’s most celebrated women writers, Welty could not rival the romantic image of the Fugitive-Agrarians, whose power was underscored by the institutional sanction granted by the academic and publishing worlds. Fully indoctrinated into the Fugitive-Agrarian view of the South, one that mirrored many of the ideals of her childhood, Spencer knew that she might be rewarded for her loyalty and talent. Even as a Vanderbilt student, she was aware that the group “reached out with high selectivity, and drew in whom they would” (Landscapes 183). Thus, while Welty, Porter, and other women writers offered alternate models of writing, they did not provide the secure literary home that was created by the Fugitive-Agrarian legacy, one that was dependent in large part upon an acceptance of southern identity that Spencer had long associated with her literal homes in Carollton and Teoc. It is my contention, then, that Spencer’s Mississippi novels speak to a complex and rather unique series of influences, and that the artistic, domestic, and political pressures she faced would lead to a “pseudo-masculine aesthetic.”22 It is no surprise, perhaps, that a writer who sought to distinguish herself as a success—both as a “southern writer” and, as importantly, as a dutiful (literary) daughter—would take the southern home as her subject, co-opting both a male perspective and masculine authorial power to reify the sacred nature of southern place, community, and identity. Yet Spencer’s

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treatment of home in the Mississippi novels is often as ambivalent as it is imitative, and her personal, stylistic, and thematic evolution is revealing, and, ultimately, essential to an understanding of her later, more progressive work.

“Escaping a Feminine Sort of Hovering Over Things”: F IR E IN THE M OR NING In approaching Fire in the Morning, Spencer explains that she “wanted to draw an extended observation of small-town life,” and thus she used Carrollton as a “physical outline” for the fictional town of Tarsus and her grandfather, John McCain, as a model for the novel’s stoic patriarch, Daniel Armstrong (Broadwell and Hoag 67; Bunting 23). Yet while her childhood homes serve as a starting point for the novel, Fire in the Morning does not reflect Spencer’s own experiences in Carrollton and Teoc but instead focuses on a male protagonist, Daniel Armstrong’s son, Kinloch. Initially content to live on the town’s fringe, both literally and figuratively, Kinloch finds himself compelled to unearth Tarsus’s sometimes brutal history, and, in doing so, must come to terms with his place in his family’s legacy. The narrative focuses on the relationship between the Armstrongs, headed by the quietly dignified Daniel, and the Gerrards, a family whose moral dissipation is traced for three generations. Kinloch is conscious of the unspoken animosity between Daniel and Simon Gerrard, and, while he is unaware of its origin, the same anger and mistrust are echoed in his relationship with Lance Gerrard, Simon’s son. Daniel refuses to reveal the source of the families’ feud, but Kinloch ultimately uncovers its origin—the Gerrards’ unethical land-grab and its ensuing violence—through insistent querying of the community. The novel is epic in its scope, and its conclusion, which is both violent and a testament to the power of stoicism, is focused primarily on Kinloch’s initiation into southern manhood. In many ways, Fire in the Morning is, then, a traditional Southern Renaissance novel in the Faulknerian mode. Like much of Faulkner’s work, the novel is set in a small Mississippi town populated by a variety of social classes, from the Snopes-like Gerrards, who entered town in a “wagon held together with bailing wire” and a mere generation later view themselves as feudal lords, to Cherry Bell LeGarde, the fallen belle who, even in her social exile, clings to the myth of white southern womanhood (108). Tarsus is also marked by the racial tensions and paradoxes that define Yoknapatawpha; even Daniel Armstrong, whose uncommon integrity is established when he saves a black man from an angry lynch

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mob, expresses disdain for black farmhands’ intellectual capacity and associates his cook’s dishes with a “negroid odor” (86). Much of the resemblance between Faulkner’s work and Spencer’s is inevitable, of course. As Spencer has explained repeatedly, as an author she was compelled to write from her own experiences; yet, her childhood stomping ground was no longer her own, but rather had been remapped as “Faulkner Country” (“Emerging as a Writer” 131). In short, because her “postage stamp of native soil,” as Faulkner has famously identified it, was adjoining his, much of their subject matter would be similar (Vanden Heuvel 255).23 Just as Flannery O’Connor saw Faulkner as the “Dixie Limited” bearing down on the stalled “mule[s] and wagon[s]” of fledgling southern writers, Spencer has characterized Faulkner as “a lion in the path, menacing further advance—or a bear in everybody’s private wilderness, if you prefer . . . Few got by without a claw mark or two” (O’Connor 818; Spencer, “Emerging as a Writer” 131).24 The “Faulkner problem” is not merely an extreme example of the anxiety of influence, however. Spencer has acknowledged that he was “a tremendously strong [influence] for a young writer to shake off,” but, as the central figure of the Southern Renaissance in the mind of most critics, he was also a model to be emulated (Bunting 20). The Fugitive-Agrarians found in Faulkner the essence of their masculine aesthetic, a writer who vanquished the genteel tradition and replaced it with an earthy immediacy. While, as noted earlier, Spencer was never specifically “coached” to employ Faulknerian rhetoric or characterization, she was aware of the need to avoid the perceived traps of “regional writing,” which, for the Fugitive-Agrarians, was shorthand for “feminine writing.” In interviews, Spencer acknowledges a selfconsciousness that informs Fire in the Morning’s complicated plot, and, even more significantly, notes that she sought to subsume her own style to a more masculine aesthetic: When I was in college, I had a natural inclination to write a little like Katherine Mansfield. So it seemed to me that if I was ever going to firm things up and be the kind of writer that I wanted to be, I needed to escape a feminine sort of hovering over things, an overly-sensitive poetic prose like Mansfield’s or Virginia Woolf’s. To get away from this, I read a lot of Hardy and Conrad—excellent writers with a very firm, controlled style. This was the way I wanted to write, and in my early novels I deliberately forced myself to avoid a more feminine style. (Broadwell and Hoag 160)

Yet, while an admiration for Hardy’s and Conrad’s style may be glimpsed in Fire in the Morning, it is Faulkner’s influence that is felt

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most clearly, not only in the novel’s setting and twisting plot, but in many of its characters’ speech, most notably Randall Gibson, Kinloch’s cousin and Tarsus’ charmingly jaded alcoholic lawyer. Randall often sounds much like Gavin Stevens, or, at times, Quentin Compson; for example, he adopts a Faulknerian cadence when he accuses Kinloch of being preoccupied with action: You aren’t content simply to comprehend; you also have to act. The insufferable conceit of it! Even if you got drunk by yourself on a sweet April night and climbed Hangman’s Hill at midnight and there was a full moon and a storm building up in the distant west, even if you stood there in the sight of nothing but God Almighty and a stray dog and imagined that anything you did could alter the course of anything that exists, in that minute you ought to climb up on the old scaffold where your father sent to men to their death and hang yourself by the neck until dead. (70)

Not only do Randall’s serpentine sentences recall Faulkner’s work, but his obsession with the past echoes Faulkner’s most haunted characters.25 Such stylistic homage may be viewed as a “claw mark or two,” but it speaks just as powerfully to Spencer’s desire to avoid “a feminine sort of hovering over things,” a style that might be dismissed as overly sentimental. What is more surprising, perhaps, is that Spencer’s fear of writing in a way that might be identified as feminine engendered a radical re-envisioning of the novel, one that decentralizes female characters and instead privileges a traditional, patriarchal hierarchy. She explains that I wanted to be firm and tough-minded . . . a novelist only, as distinct from a woman novelist . . . [I]n Fire in the Morning . . . I originally wrote long, girlish passages about the young woman [Ruth] who came to that town from a past outside it and married the central character. I had looked on it first as primarily her story, as it might indeed have been if I could have got my prose to measure up. I think I was too girlish then myself to write about her various sensitivities, hesitations, et cetera. My first editor urged me to cut all that out, so little of it remains . . . and the weight of the book fell on the men and some of the older women who were part of the town, and they held it up. (Phillips 127)

Thus, in order to avoid producing “girlish prose,” Spencer shifted the novel’s focus from Ruth to the Armstrong men and the town

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of Tarsus. Ruth’s “sensitivities and hesitations” never materialize as the central concern of the novel; instead, the novel follows Kinloch’s obsessive quest to exhume Tarsus’s history and to redefine his place within the community. His search is guided almost solely by men: Daniel Armstrong functions as Kinloch’s reluctant adviser; the delightfully verbose Randall Gibson details the Gerrards’ origins and many of their pettier crimes; and Dr. Derryberry, who lives outside Tarsus in a rural region appropriately known as Dark Corners, exposes the previous generation of Gerrards’ scheming. If Ruth is no longer the novel’s central character, though, she is “needed . . . to precipitate action,” as Spencer has explained, and she functions as the catalyst for the novel’s action when she befriends Lance Gerrard, his wife Elinor, and his sister Justin (Broadwell and Hoag 67). A newcomer to town, Ruth is incapable of making sense of Kinloch’s vague objections to her relationship with the Gerrards, yet Kinloch’s concern proves to be grounded when one night, after an evening of drinking, Ruth, Lance, Elinor, and Justin are involved in a hit-and-run accident in which Ben Gardner, the town drunk, is killed. The group swear one another to secrecy, and Ruth’s inability to share the incident with Kinloch both threatens their marriage and gives Simon Gerrard a means of blackmailing Kinloch at the close of the novel. In this way, Ruth’s culpability in the death of Ben Gardner provides the novel’s domestic drama and complicates Kinloch’s quest to expose the Gerrards. Yet, despite her ostensible agency in the novel’s central plot developments, Ruth remains an opaque and passive figure amidst the novel’s more vibrant characters and dizzying plot twists: she is not privy to Kinloch’s conversations with Daniel and Randall, she has left Tarsus when Kinloch goes to Dark Corners and later returns to confront the Gerrards, and she is absent when Daniel and Simon Gerrard both die in a battle that comes to represent the conflict between stoicism and greed. In this way, regardless of her function as the novel’s catalyst, she characterizes the detached, largely silent women commonly recognized by Southern Renaissance writers and critics. Yet, despite her curious absence from the novel’s action and seeming vacuity in many of the scenes in which she does appear, Ruth is not merely a pawn used to advance Fire in the Morning’s plot; instead, I argue that Ruth’s role, while limited, operates in two important ways, both of which reveal the novel’s muted ambivalence about the patriarchal systems and values it overtly celebrates. Thus my discussion of the novel focuses, first, on the fact that Ruth’s position as an outsider is critical to Kinloch’s evolving understanding of Tarsus as

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home, and, second, that the lack of real female community speaks to the ways in which traditional notions of the southern home necessarily diminish the role of women. Ruth reifies the notion of Tarsus as a distinct community by her very presence. She is an outsider in the town, one whose difference simultaneously unsettles the residents of Tarsus and allows them to take comfort in their own, known, identities. It is telling that almost all of the characters seem to romanticize Ruth’s position as “other.” While, certainly, her more cosmopolitan clothes and quiet manner set her apart from the people of Tarsus, they tend to credit her with a greater air of mystery than such distinctions would suggest. Even Kinloch, whose thinking is inviolately practical (critic Elsa Nettels identifies him as a man “of few words and unself-conscious virtue”), sees his wife as cloaked in mystery: “It had been eleven months since he first met her, yet time and again when he looked at her she would seem completely new to him, and the wonderment of it would fill him, as it did now. ‘It is because she is strange to things here,’ he thought, ‘and different from them all’ ” (Nettels 73; Fire in the Morning 5). Ruth does not seem elusive to Kinloch because of inscrutably feminine traits, for example, but because of his inability to place her; he is continually fascinated by her status as an outsider. Randall articulates a similar sentiment when he “claims” Ruth, explaining to Kinloch that “I had her first in a way” (67). Randall’s “ownership” of Ruth is limited to a sort of voyeuristic thrill, however, in that it invites him to confront the anxiety that Ruth’s otherness invokes: [S]he would come by, with her strangeness that cannot be placed even to the extent of calling her foreign. Her hair is too dark: it would make the fear in me grow and suddenly I would see the town, not just the little section of street visible there, but the whole town laid out before me—that tremendous universe bounded by Hangman’s Hill and the creek, Keystone Bottom and the-land-west-of town, and I couldn’t think of hill or gully where she had the slightest business to be. (67)

When Randall sees Ruth, he cannot identify any distinct quality that makes her “foreign”—his invocation of her dark hair seems a red herring at best; no other character mentions it, and Ruth is not ever identified as possessing any “ethnic” markers. Yet, Ruth’s presence triggers a sense of “fear” in Randall, one that he endeavors to assuage by attempting, unsuccessfully, to locate Ruth within the town’s boundaries. Randall, more than any other character in the novel,

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reveals himself to suffer from what might be diagnosed as “Quentin Compson syndrome”: while he allows that “I am inescapably a part of [Tarsus]” he also is vocal in his disdain for its residents and prides himself on his inability to be “defined” by the town (107, 61).26 Nevertheless, he experiences the same unease with Ruth’s apparent dispossession as the other members of the town do, and he responds to it by imagining its streets and valleys as a coherent whole, one that he can “claim” just as he claims Ruth. In many respects, Kinloch’s response to Ruth follows the pattern established by Randall: he is drawn to Ruth’s “strangeness,” yet he simultaneously is disturbed by the placelessness that she suggests and, in response, interrogates, and ultimately reinvigorates his own role in the community. Unlike Randall, however, Kinloch is not guided by an extreme self-consciousness: he is incapable of articulating his complex feelings toward Tarsus, and often is unable to interpret his own motives. Thus while Randall can thrill in the disorientation Ruth prompts in him, Kinloch feels he must resolve it, often to paradoxical ends. Kinloch’s own, more subtle, Quentinian “double consciousness” is evident early in the novel. He repeatedly refers to himself as a “stranger,” telling Ruth that “in a way that’s hard to explain we [Kinloch and Daniel] are outsiders here” (34). Yet he recognizes that such a statement is incongruous: Daniel, in his role as sheriff, had played a vital role in the community and Kinloch, while not as active in the community at large, is seen effortlessly slipping through Tarsus’s forests and bluffs in the novel’s opening passages: clearly, he is at home here. Thus, while Kinloch identifies himself as a “stranger” as well, he is not fully comfortable in this self-identification. Kinloch’s preoccupation with his uncertain status in the community is reflected in his fascination with Ruth, who is not only an outsider, but, even more dramatically, is incapable of identifying any specific home. She explains to Kinloch that while her mother had wanted to settle down, her father had a corporate position that required the family move often. As a result, Ruth lived in a series of rented homes and hotel rooms across the country, remembering the interior of the family’s “baggage-laden touring sedan” as clearly as she does any conventional home (30). The family’s traveling ends when Ruth’s father dies and they return to Louisville, Ruth’s mother’s hometown; however, the family remains “unsettled” when they are not welcomed by their extended family and are shunted to a cold, roach-filled house (31). Shortly thereafter, her mother dies and her only brother leaves to seek his fortune. Ruth is, in essence, homeless: her childhood is marked by temporary homes and her adolescence is

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defined by an alienation from both an identifiable physical home and from the family it suggests. In wooing Ruth, then, it is not surprising that Kinloch unconsciously adopts a strategy that underscores Tarsus’s agrarian stability and dynastic continuity, concepts that stand in contrast to the “mysterious company” that decreed Ruth’s family’s many moves and to her scattered family (30); as much as he is “selling” himself during their courtship, he is also advertising Tarsus as home. Kinloch spends several afternoons taking Ruth on tours of Tarsus and its environs, and in doing so he “discovered for the first time that Tarsus was wonderfully rich in stories, the odd kind of exaggerated, half-accurate lore that small town people tell about themselves, repeat, and believe” (17). Even as he recognizes that he is replicating a benignly inauthentic version of Tarsus, he takes pleasure in his task, not only because it charms Ruth, but because it also allows him to feel as if he is a participant in his community. As he shows the town to Ruth, a true outsider, and recalls its stories, Kinloch realizes that he is home. This recognition of home is central to the novel, and it is one that reflects the values of Southern Renaissance literature as they were articulated by Donald Davidson and the Fugitive-Agrarians. While there was a consensus among the group that the best writing rejected the romantic vision of place and community that had been embraced by the nineteenth-century sentimentalists, Davidson’s notion of the autochthonous ideal signifies an ardent insistence that home is, in fact, both a valid and meaningful concept, one that is fundamental to southern identity. In his essay “Why the South Has a Great Modern Literature,” he points to a “blessed knowledge” that “possesses the heart rather than a knowledge achieved merely by the head” and that is “the dominant characteristic of Southern society” (171). While he identifies this knowledge as the equivalent of “the grace of God pervad[ing] the heart and soul,” he does not define the essence of this knowledge and sneers at those who would attempt to codify it, maintaining that “devotion to this knowledge . . . is the great, all-pervasive ‘cultural factor’ for which the sociologists have neglected to provide data” (171–72). The elusiveness of Davidson’s explanation of this knowledge—this “epistemology of home,” as I identify it—reveals, in some ways, a bit of sleight of hand: like “the grace of God” it cannot be challenged by those who stand outside of the circle of knowledge. Furthermore, the fact that this epistemology of home is felt rather than defined means that it cannot be easily articulated, as perhaps most famously evinced in Quentin Compson’s assertion to Shreve in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), “You

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can’t understand it. You would have to be born there” (289). Yet, despite the seeming ambiguity of home, it is central to southern identity, and, in Davidson’s eyes, to southern literature. In a presentation given at the 1978 Downeast Southern Renascence Conference, Spencer reaffirms the importance of the organic, unquestioned connection to home that is at the heart of Davidson’s autochthonous ideal. She explains that while “place as separate from character scarcely occurs to the Southern writer at all,” place speaks to all southerners via what Spencer calls “place spirits” (“Untitled,” ms. 1). These spirits will not speak to those who are strangers, she argues: “If [a visitor] has informed himself of anything about [the place], that is still something learned while what the local scene will give him is something that he knows intuitively, instinctively in his bones” (emphasis mine; ms. 4). Here she echoes both the elusiveness of “Why the South Has a Great Modern Literature” and Davidson’s rhetoric of the epistemology of home; in Spencer’s taxonomy of place, she too identifies a knowledge of southern tradition—and, in fact, of southern being—that cannot be understood by outsiders, be they the academics at whom Davidson railed or the casual observer trying to satiate his curiosity about the South. The belief that the knowledge of home is fundamental to identity also closely informs Kinloch’s search for self in Fire in the Morning. Thus, in the early passages of the novel in which Kinloch shows Tarsus to Ruth, he is able to speak to her about those things that he inherently knows, and therefore assures himself of his status as a “native.” His confidence is evident in many of Kinloch and Ruth’s exchanges. For example, Kinloch explains that Tarsus is deeply invested in its own myth and, accordingly, the townspeople refuse to acknowledge that anyone ever chooses to leave. Ruth offhandedly replies: “Oh, it’s that way everywhere” “No. It’s only that way in Tarsus. Look. They forget their dead.” “Only in Tarsus?” she smiled. “Yes,” he insisted earnestly, almost angrily. “That is something you must understand. And if you can’t understand it don’t ask me to explain it. You’ll just have to believe it’s true.” (19)

Here, Kinloch’s replicates Quentin’s dismissal of Shreve; he is sharing knowledge with Ruth that cannot be explained in any traditional sense. It is, in short, the epistemology of home, and Ruth’s experience—her otherness—precludes her from challenging it.

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Yet while Ruth’s “homelessness” initially casts Kinloch’s sense of groundedness into sharp relief, their relationship eventually further troubles Kinloch’s tentative understanding of home and his role within it. He credits this at first to the complexity inherent in attempting to interpret the place spirits’ voices; he feels that he cannot explain Tarsus to Ruth because any history he might provide would require infinite explication, believing that “Words always broke down for him under the real things that had to be told and those things depended perhaps on other things before them and so on backwards endlessly” (33). However, Kinloch finds himself becoming increasingly frustrated, not only because showing Tarsus to Ruth demands that he either endeavor to articulate the myriad of facts that inform his understanding of home or risk depicting Tarsus as a “romantic, if still incongruous, legend,” but because in attempting to give voice to his understanding of home, he often encounters his own lack of knowledge (19). Until Ruth’s arrival, Kinloch is satisfied with his imperfect definition of home. He explains that he has “learned not to care” about his position within the town of Tarsus; instead of aligning himself with the community, he defines home through his father’s model (34). This is made most clear, perhaps, in Kinloch’s memory of his earliest confrontation with Lance Gerrard. As boys, the two are engaged in a series of vicious physical battles after a horrific incident in which Lance drowns Kinloch’s puppy. Finally, Kinloch breaks Lance’s collarbone and Simon Gerrad visits Daniel to call a halt to the fights. Daniel does not apologize for Kinloch, and after Simon leaves, Kinloch decides that Simon’s visit had proved one thing to him: that the new bond between him and his father was not imagined, nor had it sprung from anything that had happened to him or that he had done. Something existed already, waiting to claim its counterpart in him. A new level unfolded beneath him and beyond that there were others, distance confused, presence actual, and only by seeking downward, he had found, could he know where he had once stood. (29)

This passage stands out in the novel, primarily because it breaks with the more straightforward tone of the bulk of the narrative. Here, Spencer attempts to convey Kinloch’s knowledge: the “something” she describes—but does not attempt to name—is an inherent knowledge, one that is created by Kinloch’s adherence to the stoic ideal in battling with Lance rather than submitting to his bullying or asking

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for adult mediation. Interestingly, Kinloch imagines this bond in terms of its spatial dimensions: his connection with his father, and his ability to follow in his father’s model, defines place for him. Thus, home is defined by their shared understanding of traditional southern masculine values rather than communal acceptance. Kinloch’s marriage to Ruth, however, complicates his understanding of his father’s stoic model, and, ultimately, of home. He finds himself “illogically caught between” his wife and his father, although neither Ruth nor Daniel acknowledges any tension (35). Ruth, unaware of the unnamed “something” that binds Daniel and Kinloch, sees Tarsus as a new opportunity for her. She rejoices in the romantic image of small town life that Kinloch initially had created for her, and, as a result, befriends Lance and Elinor Gerrard. It is this relationship that, in Kinloch’s mind, positions “his father as the prophet he could no longer question and define[s] her as the combatant he could not challenge” (35). When he tries to intervene, neither Daniel, who will not discuss the Gerrards, nor Ruth, who cannot understand Kinloch’s rather cryptic warnings about the Gerrards’ nature, responds. As a result, Kinloch finds himself asking a series of questions: “And what does father think? . . . What are the Gerrards? . . . What is Ruth? . . . What am I?” (37–38). His allegiance to Ruth, which seems to demand a break in his loyalty to his father, undermines his once certain belief in his own code of behavior and his incontestable knowledge of Tarsus as home. This schism is made more dramatic when Randall Gibson begins to tell Kinloch the story of the Gerrards’ history, stopping just before he reveals that, in fact, the land now owned by the Gerrards rightfully belongs to Daniel Armstrong and his best friend, Felix McKee. Randall taunts Kinloch with his own knowledge; instead of telling him about the land’s history, Randall merely marvels at Kinloch’s lack of awareness: “Then you don’t know . . . I thought you must have known. Time and time I have asked myself, Does Kinloch know? Quickly I would say to myself, Of course. But some slower, surer instinct in me would always reply, No” (83). The doubts that have arisen since Kinloch’s marriage to Ruth are now solidified: the knowledge that Kinloch was certain he possessed the sense of understanding that assured him of his place and defined Tarsus as home is incomplete Significantly, it is just as Kinloch begins to question many of his assumptions about home that Ruth leaves Tarsus: returning from his conversation with Randall and a failed attempt to elicit more information from his father, Kinloch becomes newly enraged by Ruth’s relationship with Lance and Elinor and confronts her. Ruth mistakenly

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assumes that Kinloch’s anger is evidence that he has discovered that she was driving the car that killed Ben Gardner, and leaves Tarsus in shame. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw views Ruth and Kinloch’s fight as one of the novel’s few blatant contrivances, noting that “the manipulation of their conversation, in which neither one expresses or apprehends crucial information, seems forced and melodramatic” (27). While in some ways Prenshaw’s observation is accurate, it is also telling that their fight erupts over not only Ruth’s erroneous belief that Kinloch knows about the accident, but also Kinloch’s perception that Ruth knows the story of the Gerrards’ land-grab before he did: “Has everybody—everybody—known then, except me?” he desperately demands (157). It seems inconceivable to Kinloch that Ruth, who may have gleaned facts about Tarsus but should not possess knowledge about the town’s history, should know more than he does. It is in her absence, then, that Kinloch carries on his quest, tracking down Dr. Derryberry in Dark Corners and returning home to confront Simon Gerrard. Significantly, he is never intent upon revenge; rather, as he explains to Daniel, “I don’t want the land . . . What I want is Simon Gerrard. Simon Gerrard is a thief and a liar and I want it known, known to the world and known to his children” (151). Kinloch seeks to regain control of knowledge, shaping not only the town’s existing narrative, but to redefine, and thus rediscover, his own place within it. Ultimately, he does confront Simon Gerrard, who, with his children at his side, demands that Kinloch destroy evidence of the theft or he will expose Ruth’s complicity in Ben Gardner’s death. While the Gerrards’ account of the accident momentarily knocks the wind out of Kinloch—we see him quite literally gasping for breath—he determines that both truths will be known, and that both the Gerrards and Ruth should be punished for their transgressions. In this way, Kinloch not only demonstrates his own complete knowledge of Tarsus, thus resituating the town as home, but he does so by following the stoic model set forth by his father. While he previously has been impatient with Daniel’s refusal to express hatred for the Gerrards, Kinloch now finds himself adhering to the same code of honor that has dictated Daniel’s apparent passivity. Thus, Kinloch’s confrontation of the Gerrards represents a convergence of the novel’s various treatments of home, suggesting that a knowledge of home is accompanied by—or even, perhaps, made possible by—the adoption of traditional masculine values. This is further underscored in the novel’s final pages, in which Kinloch fully assumes his father’s role: he forgives the Gerrards their debt to the Armstrongs by refusing Lance’s gift of a patch of the contested land; he decides

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that he will continue to live in Tarsus, explaining that “it seems right for me that way”; and he fully accepts his spiritual inheritance from Daniel when Ruth becomes pregnant with a boy, suggesting the continuity of the father-son relationship (274). Thus, by the novel’s conclusion, Kinloch not only repairs his uncertain conception of home but reifies the traditional values linked to the southern home. If Kinloch is fully initiated into southern manhood by his confrontation with the Gerrards and the loss of his father, however, Ruth does not undergo a similar transformation. She reappears in Tarsus almost immediately after Kinloch’s confrontation with Simon Gerrard, announcing that she has decided to confess her role in the accident. She explains to Kinloch that “it’s the only way” to rejoin the Armstrongs: “Isn’t it the only way? You and Mr. Dan . . . and his father in the picture in the hall and your mother in the picture on the dresser and your grandmother . . . They would look at me, he would look at me, and you would look at me and know, and so it’s the only way until it’s done I can’t go inside and say I’m home” (253–54). Her statement here echoes Kinloch’s thinking: Ruth innately seems to understand that shared knowledge is the essence of home. Yet, Ruth is unable to achieve the sort of reunion that Kinloch experiences. When she asserts that as further penance she will end her relationship with Lance and Elinor, she tries to explain that her friendship with them was the result of the fact that she “didn’t understand, that’s all” (254). She tells Kinloch that she now “understands” the code she has broken, implying that her recognition will allow her, indeed, to make Tarsus home (254). Interestingly, Kinloch’s reply is both swift and cruel: “No . . . You don’t understand. You just know, that’s all, you don’t understand” (254–55). In Kinloch’s own newfound sense of inclusion, he is insistent that Ruth remain an outsider. Ultimately, then, it is by demonstrating his authority to deny Ruth access to the type of “blessed knowledge” of home identified by Donald Davidson that Kinloch assures himself of his own status as a “native.” As readers, however, we are inclined to mistrust Kinloch’s dismissal of Ruth’s knowledge, just as readers of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! cannot fully accept Quentin’s rejection of Shreve’s capacity to understand Thomas Sutpen’s narrative; in fact, throughout the novel Shreve has played a pivotal part in the imagining of that narrative. Even as it solidifies Absalom, Absalom!’s theme, then, Quentin’s insistence that “You would have to be born there” does not fully ring true. Similarly, Kinloch’s unwillingness to credit Ruth with true knowledge simultaneously celebrates the ideal of the inherently masculine formulation of an epistemology of home and calls it into question. As a result,

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Ruth’s return both solidifies Kinloch’s acceptance into the southern patriarchal tradition and, more tentatively, suggests an ambivalence about the exclusionary nature of that system. This imbricate message—the reverence of traditional constructions of southern home and identity and the subtle uncertainty about female subjectivity within this construction—is apparent not only in Ruth’s relationship with Kinloch but in her friendship with Elinor Gerrard as well. For the most part, while it is a source of constant aggravation for Kinloch, the women’s bond is only lightly sketched for the reader. In fact, we only see them together in the first portion of the novel: in parts two and three, it is revealed that they think of one another, but their relationship is no longer visible to us. Despite this fact, Ruth and Elinor are inextricably bound by a unique series of circumstances, paramount of which is the fact that Elinor, too, is deemed an “outsider” by the townspeople. Elinor’s family is from the Mississippi Delta, which, while not distant in a strict geographic sense, seems remote from Tarsus and the state’s hill region. Unlike Ruth, however, Elinor has not made any effort to make Tarsus—or the Gerrard house—her home; instead, she has assumed a jaded persona that is intended to reveal her frustration with small-town life, the pretenses of her in-laws, and the indolence of her husband. It would seem, then, that Ruth’s relative naïveté and Elinor’s disillusionment with Tarsus’s patriarchal structures, as well as their shared otherness, would function as the basis for a sense of female community. Certainly, our expectation of the significance of their friendship is further supported by the now widely held assumption about the importance of community in southern women’s fiction. As Linda Tate has observed, southern women writers often have used the domestic sphere, conventionally viewed as enormously restrictive, as a realm to explore “women’s creativity, women’s community, women’s talk, and women’s roootedness to and identity with the natural landscape” (11). In the last twenty-five years, the notion of a distinct community of southern women has become a critical touchstone, and, despite the multiple and diverse forms of female community that exist, it is often read as offering a means of subversion as well as a manner of connection.27 As a result, many studies of Spencer’s work, as well as those of her female literary predecessors, including Eudora Welty, focus on their use of community as a tool to fully explore southern women’s subjectivity. Yet, as southern scholars have pointed out, this practice runs parallel to a longer-standing tradition of southern community based entirely on white, patriarchal values, and a phallocentric literary

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tradition that similarly rejects the presence of an alternate, wholly female, community. As Mab Segrest argues, one of the “terrible absences in male-dominated fictions is the absence of female community . . . The [fictional] small-town communities . . . showed complete lack of support for female-identification.” She argues that traditional southern literature demonstrates “no respect for female solitude or the presence of female community . . .” (qtd in Kreyling 106–107). Tellingly, Segrest points not only to the work of William Faulkner as an example of this adherence to a monolithic, patriarchal vision of community, but also to stories by Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers. Thus, literature dubbed “serious fiction” by the FugitiveAgrarians, whether authored by women or men, was inclined to once again veer from anything that might be considered feminine and certainly that which is now identified as “feminist.”28 The friendship shared by Ruth Armstrong and Elinor Gerrard in Fire in the Morning and other, minor female relationships in the novel speak to the dual allegiance of twentieth-century women writers, especially those writing in the wake of the Renaissance. In Fire in the Morning, then, female community is at once a means of offering an alternative to the patriarchal values of Tarsus and, at the same time, a hollow notion—a female collective that serves primarily to buttress the white, masculine principles that have traditionally defined Tarsus. Certainly, within the older generation of Tarsus women no meaningful community exists. Indeed, the relative duplicity of women is seen in the example of Henrietta Gerrard, whose actions regularly reveal her investment in—and manipulation of—masculine notions of community. For example, in Randall Gibson’s account of Cherry Bell LaGarde’s fall from grace, he credits Henrietta with initiating the gossip that eventually led to Cherry Bell’s self-exile. Randall explains that Henrietta’s actions stem from her desire to marry Cherry Bell’s suitor, a man who, bound by convention, can only court a southern “lady,” one whose virtue is seen as intact. After she is married, Henrietta further demonstrates her devotion to male southern mythology by naming her children Lance, after her favorite Chivalric knight, and Justin, after Justin McCarthy, the author of If I Were King, a celebration of a Medieval poet.29 And even after enjoying the security cemented by her years as the Gerard matriarch, Henrietta is incapable of imaging a construction of female community: she is unable to connect with her intelligent, independent daughter-in-law Elinor (although she take great pride in Elinor’s lineage, which she imagines to be aristocratic), and she encourages her daughter Justin to focus on nabbing a suitable husband rather than strengthening female bonds.

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Elinor and Ruth, then, suggest a new type of community, one that they must forge themselves. Their connection is tested almost immediately when Ben Gardner is killed and Ruth, Elinor, Lance, and Justin must decide what they will do. While Justin immediately points out that Ruth was the driver, and therefore the most culpable of the group, Elinor swings quickly to Ruth’s defense. She insists that Ruth has been goaded into the evening’s entertainment, which consisted of helping Jessie Mae Gardner, a comically pathetic figure, escape from the abusive Ben. Jessie Mae’s welfare is not the group’s primary interest; instead, Lance, Justin, Elinor, and Ruth become involved as a means of relieving their own boredom. It is for this reason that Elinor insists that the blame lies with Justin and Lance, whose casual disregard for others is reflected in the evening’s course of events. Elinor declares, “So help me God if I have to swear on a stack of Bibles as high as Simon’s house that Ruth was asleep on the couch with George [Justin’s beau, who has passed out earlier in the evening], I’ll do it and don’t think I won’t” (53). She understands that Ruth will not defend herself, and, just as instinctively, she knows that Lance, because of his position, will not be blamed and that Justin will betray Ruth to save herself, just as Henrietta had betrayed Cherry Bell a generation earlier. Elinor uses her own power, then, which she identifies by boldly invoking the image of Simon Gerrard’s house, a symbol of male status, as a means of saving Ruth from Justin and Lance’s accusations. Despite Elinor’s intercession, however, she knows that Ruth is still suffering. While we do not see the women together after the accident, and Ruth mentions Elinor only in passing in her conversations with Kinloch, we are given insight into Ruth’s uncertainty through a series of Elinor’s interior monologues.30 She correctly believes that Ruth wants to confess her role in the accident to Kinloch but that she has become confused after all three Gerrards insist that they must maintain their silence. Elinor recalls, “The nearest [Ruth] could come to explaining her confusion was to ask me what she should really do, and when I said ‘Leave it alone,’ she finally agreed because for some ungodly reason she counts on me” (190). While Elinor’s tone is dismissive of Ruth’s trust, this seeming indifference is merely an example of Elinor’s customary understated affectation; in truth, she is the only Gerrard who is looking out for Ruth’s best interest, and, more importantly, she is the only Gerrard who seems both to understand Kinloch’s nature and to respect his relationship with Ruth. Thus, while her advice may be based on a faulty morality, it is equally rooted in Elinor’s understanding that in a town like Tarsus, “you pay by the pound or not at all” (191).

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Of course, Elinor’s advice is moot when Simon Gerrard finds out about the accident and uses it to try to defend himself against Kinloch’s demands that he reveal the circumstances surrounding the Gerrards’ land acquisition some thirty years earlier. When Lance does not reject his father’s tactics, and, in fact, offers his support in Simon’s counterattack against Kinloch, however, Elinor leaves him. In some ways, her decision is not a surprise: she has harbored a simmering resentment of Lance throughout the novel, and she has dismissed divorce as an option because her dissatisfaction with him is difficult to quantify. [She thinks, “I can’t charge mental cruelty, because it’s my own mind that’s doing it to me” (188).] Lance’s willingness to sacrifice Ruth to protect the Gerrards’ name is an injustice that she cannot tolerate, however, and Elinor’s renunciation of her position in the town is a clear rejection of the Gerrards’ cowardice and a patent act of solidarity with Ruth. Yet, the repercussions of Elinor’s decision are limited, and the sense of female community that it would seem to foster is unrealized. As Elinor packs her things to leave the house she shared with Lance, the phone rings; Elinor tells Lance that the only call she will take is from Ruth, yet that call never comes. Ruth is intent on repairing her relationship with the Armstrongs, and, unaware that Elinor is leaving, never tries to get in touch with her to announce her own return to Tarsus. Thus, the connection between the women remains fragmentary; Ruth does not share her experiences in New York with Elinor, and Elinor cannot convey her sorrow and fear about the collapse of her marriage. Elinor bitterly consoles herself by deciding that “I won’t cry. Let Ruth do my crying for me. She’s got the shoulder to cry on. And if you haven’t got it any more, you haven’t got it, and if you never had it, you never had it, and to hell with it, Elinor Dudley, because it’s just Elinor Dudley, like it always was . . .” (252). Here Elinor suggests the transitory nature of women’s relationships: Kinloch can function as a shoulder for Ruth to cry on, but Ruth is incapable of serving a similar function for Elinor, despite the strength that Elinor has lent to Ruth during her crisis. Elinor believes herself to be entirely alone, and in this interior monologue she discounts Ruth’s support in the same breath as she discards her married name. Elinor’s alienation is further underscored by both Ruth’s and Jessie Mae Gardner’s ability to seamlessly relocate themselves within the patriarchal tradition of Tarsus. Somewhat ironically, the phone call that Elinor had hoped would be from Ruth is actually from Jessie Mae, who is announcing her wedding. Jessie Mae serves as a reminder of the artificiality of much of the sense of female community

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in the novel: Elinor and Ruth have joined Justin and Lance in helping Jessie Mae escape from her violent husband only because it will create some excitement in an otherwise dull evening, not out of a sense of sympathy or even obligation. Ironically, the story that Jessie Mae has concocted to enlist their help—that she needs to meet a cousin who will help her run away from Tarsus—is equally as insincere. In fact, she is meeting a lover. And the wedding that she calls Elinor to announce is to yet a third man, one whose position will presumably reinitiate her into the community. Similarly, the novel closes with the revelation that Kinloch and Ruth’s marriage is repaired and that they are about to give birth to a son. Ruth’s role as a mother and wife in a traditional, patriarchal home is solidified. Thus, despite their connections—their roles as “outsiders” and the traumatic experiences that should bind them—the women in Fire in the Morning find themselves tied to patriarchal notions of home. Ruth and, to a lesser extent, Jessie Mae, find themselves embracing a system that necessarily excludes them, and Elinor rejects the same system but in doing so becomes further silenced, separated from the women of Tarsus and the possibility of female community, and, ultimately, becoming invisible in the novel as a whole after she leaves the town. Fire in the Morning is, in many ways, a celebration of masculine virtue and patriarchal tradition. It is ultimately a Renaissance novel in its most important respects, focusing on the enduring power of land, the haunting authority of the past, the importance of stoic inheritance, and, perhaps most importantly, the function of each of these components in an understanding of the southern home. As notably, it rejects any discernible “feminine hovering” that might discredit its merit in a male-dominated critical marketplace. Yet, Fire in the Morning also suggests an ambivalence within this celebration of the traditional southern home: Ruth’s quiet uncertainty and Elinor’s palpable anger combine to suggest the ways in which Tarsus cannot function as a comfortable home for those outside of the traditional power structure. Thus, at the same time that the novel’s conclusion seems a veneration of Agrarian values—the Armstrongs triumph over the Gerrards in their moral battle, and Kinloch, unlike the newly abandoned Lance, will produce a heir to continue in Daniel’s model— the narrative threads that are not neatly wrapped up in the concluding pages haunt the reader: Once her need for atonement has passed, can Ruth reconcile herself to the role of passive wife, content to “know” but not “understand,” or might she demand to insert herself into Tarsus’s unfolding history? And in divorcing herself not only from Lance but Tarsus, will Elinor return to her family home, or might she

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forge a new, unimagined home elsewhere? Thus, while the novel ends with a moment of understanding between Kinloch and Lance, the resolution suggested in their handshake in this scene is undermined by the uncertainty suggested by Ruth and Elinor, their invisible, yet compelling, counterparts.

Continued “Calm Strength and Conviction”: T HIS C ROOK ED WA Y and T HE VOICE AT THE B ACK D OOR Significantly, the critical appreciation of Fire in the Morning, particularly from the Fugitive-Agrarian circle, focused not on the novel’s dissonant elements, but rather on its adherence to the aesthetic and philosophic norms central to the southern literary canon and the traditional construction of southern identity. Most telling of all the commendations, perhaps, came from Donald Davidson, whose discussion of the novel in a September 13, 1948, letter to Spencer’s editor, David Clay, focuses as much on Spencer’s interpretation of his autochthonous ideal as it does the work itself: I rejoice in [Spencer’s positive reviews in the New York Times and Herald Tribune], as I know you do. They are no more than Elizabeth deserves, but I am glad that, in this send-off, she fell into the hands of decent reviewers, who didn’t feel called upon to sneer and smear because Elizabeth doesn’t make much out of the “class struggle” or damn Tarsus for not being interested in “social welfare,” “one world,” “civil rights,” etc., etc. I make this comment with real feeling, for certain reasons that you are acquainted with. Possibly Elizabeth is lucky—as you, her sponsor, are too—in that she publishes now rather than a year or two earlier, when she would have been more likely to fall into the hands of tendentious reviewers. Even now, she is certain to incur some insults from reviewers who want southern novelists to write like Lillian Smith or Howard Fast, but I think, or at least hope, that such reviewers & critics (with the booksellers who have catered to the shallow animosities they cultivated) are under present circumstances losing some ground. By way of comment on Fire in the Morning, I shall say that I have read it—and re-read it—with deepening satisfaction and admiration . . . I should say that the book probably heralds the arrival of a new generation of Southern—and perhaps American—novelists who will not be torn and distracted by special issues, as Thos. Wolfe, Hemingway, and various others of the past generation have been. I believe in the promise of Elizabeth Spencer’s work because I see in this book, as any

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serious reader must, a calm strength and a conviction that suggests great resources. (Spencer Collection NLC)

Davidson’s support of the Fire in the Morning, like that of Warren, Lytle, and others who responded to Mead, Dodd’s request for comment, would have been crucial not only in marketing the novel, but in shaping Spencer’s career. 31 As a result, Davidson’s emphasis on Spencer’s refusal to engage with the “special issues” of southern identity is an endorsement not only of Fire in the Morning’s focus on traditional notions of home but also an encouragement of Spencer’s continued acceptance of southern values. Her “promise,” as he sees it, lies within her ability to resist the temptation to evaluate the South’s social paradigms and, instead, to merely depict them as they have existed in the past and as they can be traced through the midtwentieth century. Davidson’s praise, however, functioned as a double-edged sword for Spencer. As Fred Hobson has noted, Davidson’s insistence on writers’ observance of the autochthonous ideal was beneficial in that it encouraged southern writers to avoid the overly self-conscious regionalism that marked earlier, excessively precious forms of local color fiction. Yet Hobson is quick to point out that Davidson’s investment in the autochthonous ideal was informed primarily by his own conservative social agenda and that as a result, “the artistic consequences of such a standard would not always be favorable. For Davidson was essentially calling for a lack of social tension between the literary artist and his social and cultural environment, and it is out of tension, not harmony, that great art often arises” (The Southern Writer 80). Thus, Spencer was, in some ways, straightjacketed by Fire in the Morning’s success: the message that was being conveyed to her by her Vanderbilt mentor—who was at the center of the academic and publishing worlds where her success was critical—was that the primary strength of her work was its conformity to masculinist social and literary ideals. Perhaps it is as a result that Spencer’s next two Mississippi novels would follow closely many of the themes and techniques that had marked Fire in the Morning, and while she would ultimately diverge from Davidson’s directives in her depiction of race in The Voice at the Back Door, she would still rely heavily on the patriarchal motifs that informed the vocabulary of traditional Renaissance literature. This is most readily apparent in the later Mississippi novels’ continued emphasis on male protagonists. Just as she had in planning Fire in the Morning, Spencer envisioned both of her successive novels

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as centered on a female character’s story; yet, just as Ruth’s narrative is subsumed by Kinloch’s quest, female voices are diminished in This Crooked Way and The Voice at the Back Door. Spencer explains that This Crooked Way was inspired by Elinor’s story of her family’s background, sketched in a dinner conversation in Fire in the Morning. “[T]hat story interested me,” Spencer has explained in an interview. I didn’t have time in the scope of Fire in the Morning to get into it, but [Elinor] interested me as a character . . . [H]er family background, as she expressed it, seemed to have a good deal of kick in it as a story, and I began to wonder what kind of people, where did they live, what were they like, and that unsolved, unexplored part of the first novel led me to the second. (Bunting 22–23)

Interestingly, it is Elinor whom Spencer first identifies as an “unexplored” character, but the imaginative process ultimately led Spencer toward Amos Dudley, Elinor’s father, who became the novel’s protagonist. In fact, Elinor is only glimpsed in this novel; while her family’s background is explored in depth, Elinor exists primarily as a testament to Amos’s corrupting power. Similarly, Spencer shifted her focus from a female character to a male protagonist in The Voice at the Back Door. She explains that “I had thought [The Voice at the Back Door] was going to be Marcia Mae Hunt’s story, about her running off with a stranger. Then the local scene became so powerful and intricate that I couldn’t pull away from it. As a result, Marcia Mae’s story was no longer central” (Broadwell and Hoag 66–67). Instead, the novel is concerned with Duncan Harper, an all-American football player once jilted by Marcia Mae. Duncan finds himself stepping into the role of Sheriff of Lacey, a small Mississippi town very much like Tarsus, just as racial anxiety is coming to a head. The social crisis at the heart of the novel is paralleled by a more domestic drama, and in this secondary plot line both Marcia Mae, who becomes Duncan’s lover, and Tinker Harper, Duncan’s wife, are often reduced to static, or even invisible, characters. In one instance Marcia Mae’s presence is noted by a scent she has left behind, for example, and Tinker is, as Spencer herself has identified, “almost a saint figure, a person without worldly interests” (62). Thus, not only are the roles of female characters minimized in the later Mississippi novels, but the notion of female community that was hesitatingly explored in Fire in the Morning is all but abandoned as these few female characters are alienated or placed in oppositional relationships.

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The privileging of male characters in each of the Mississippi novels is matched by Spencer’s continued emphasis on “masculine” themes and forms. Like Fire in the Morning, both This Crooked Way and The Voice at the Back Door are rooted in largely agrarian communities that are populated by characters who seek to define themselves in relation to their shared histories. This is especially true of This Crooked Way, which reviewers again characterized as overtly Faulknerian: Ary Dudley is often seen as adopting Thomas Sutpen’s “design,” obsessively creating a plantation from swamp land and wooing the daughter of a prominent family in order to achieve his “rightful” place.32 The novel’s formal elements also echo Faulkner; in particular, This Crooked Way’s use of multiple narrators to define discrete sections of the novel calls to mind the structure of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. And, like Fire in the Morning, This Crooked Way is peppered with unmistakably Faulknerian prose, sentences that deliberately reject “feminine hovering” in favor of Faulkner’s modernist layering of clauses. For example, in the novel’s first section, the limited omniscient narrative voice observes: From across the threshold Amos looked into the small overcrowded room where crated books and trunks and canned rations called to mind a freakish sort of journey, not willed or even wished, but a progress just the same, like that of a river moving deeper and dirtier, more sluggish but stronger too, going downward with the tilt of the land, and one step retraced across the threshold would have sunk him in it, and God, the deed, and Ary Morgan, that now so potently flanked him, all would slip away, lost along green banks. (49)

While Spencer later noted that the first two Mississippi novels display “too much fancy eloquence, too many wobbles and mistakes in style” that suggest the immaturity of her own voice, sentences such as these indicate Spencer’s amplified attempts to appropriate masculine authorial power (Broadwell and Hoag 61). However, like Fire in the Morning, This Crooked Way is most notable for its dogmatic acceptance of a traditional notion of the southern home. Amos Dudley’s megalomaniacal quest to build a dynasty equal to, or greater than, those of the Delta’s wealthiest planters speaks not only to his belief that God has selected him for inordinate reward, but that that reward may be interpreted in terms of land and status, markers of southern masculine honor. Thus, while Amos Dudley is radically different from Kinloch Armstrong—whereas Kinloch is contemplative and principled, Amos is impulsive and often

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cruel—they are both compelled to act by their devotion to the ideals of the southern home. For Kinloch this means unearthing the town’s past so that his knowledge of his “place” is complete. Amos, on the other hand, is dissatisfied with the home in which he has grown up and the economic and spiritual inheritance it promises. Using only the most dubious of raw materials and his substantial will, then, he is determined to create his own version of the mythic southern home and thus achieve the secure identity it suggests. The novel opens with Amos’s violent self-baptism, which reveals not only the sense of religious fervor that drives him throughout the novel, but his own perceived agency in his election; he chooses not to be baptized at the revival he is attending, but to christen himself in a swollen river, even at the risk of drowning. Thus, his initiation as a “child of God” teaches him not the passivity and obedience associated with traditional doctrine, but the importance of forging his own path, one that he believes will be shaped by the hand of God (13). It is with this sense of empowerment that he returns home, eager to make his mark by working at the family’s dry goods store. Yet, shortly after his baptism, Amos finds himself frustrated by his family’s inability to appreciate his entrepreneurial skills, and he subsequently identifies home as suffocating rather than nurturing. This shift in Amos’s identification of home is indirectly foreshadowed by the reappearance of one of his older brothers, Ned: a day after he returns from his river baptism, Amos comes home to find Ned sitting in his father’s chair. Ned seems an almost mythic figure to Amos; a drinker and a gambler who leaves town when his debts mount, Ned is the perfect foil to Ephraim, the brother who has assumed the patriarchal mantle after Clyde Dudley, their father, has become ill. Unlike the literal-minded Ephraim, Ned seems to possess the self-assurance that Amos seeks. Yet Ned instantly reveals this air of authority to be false when he hops out of the chair as their father approaches; in a simple gesture, he demonstrates to Amos that he cannot inherit his father’s place. In fact, Amos ultimately comes to believe that, in the shadow of Ephraim’s absolute dependability, no act of bravery or cleverness will be fully recognized by their father.33 After Ephraim stubbornly denies the irrefutable promise of Amos’s entrepreneurial instinct, Amos leaves the town of Yacona, ultimately settling in the equally small town of Lacey, where he builds his own grocery store, surpassing the success of the one helmed by his father and brother. Yet, despite his accomplishment in besting Clyde and Ephraim, Amos is desperately lonely. In recreating his family’s business, he has been unable to construct the home he feels he has

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been denied. His “destiny” becomes apparent to him, though, when he sees Ross Morgan, a rich Delta planter, and Ary Morgan, his beautiful and spirited daughter. Amos’s reaction to the two is immediate and palpable: he is intensely intimidated and desires nothing more than to “get straight back where I belong” (40). Ary’s “nerve,” which is expressed in her bold horsemanship, initially convinces Amos of his inferiority and nearly sends him back to Yacona, yet he changes his mind when Newt Simpson, an alcoholic lawyer not unlike Randall Simpson, explains the source of the Morgans’ strength: Before Gray ever shouldered arms against the Blue [the Morgans] had housed themselves to the best of their advantage in a brick mansion styled with such classical grace that no one had to speak of its size which is phenomenal. At this place, which they named Dellwood, they have multiplied, thriven and entertained so generously that none but a besotted and worthless ingrate would dare to mention that beyond producing children, cotton, and food in comparable quantities, they have never accomplished one noteworthy feat. (42)

Newt Simpson reveals, then, that while the Morgan home may seem to represent the family’s potential for great accomplishment, its possession is, in fact, their primary accomplishment. Thus Amos’s anguished claim that “There aint really but one difference between me and them . . . land” is as accurate as it is self-evidently naïve: Amos lacks authority because he is excluded from the traditional power structures inherent in Delta plantation culture (44). Amos comes to believe that his destiny is landownership, but he is equally consumed by a desire for Ary Morgan. In some ways, his obsession with her makes sense in relation to his desire for success: marrying a plantation owner’s daughter would legitimize him, minimizing the stigma of his hill country origins. Yet Amos is as attracted to Ary for the ways in which she does not fit easily within southern paradigms as he is for the security she suggests. When he first spots her at the horse auction, he is resentful of what he perceives to be the other spectators’ arrogance: he thinks to himself that while they are landowners now, “they had all grubbed in the ground once, same as him, and oughn’t forget it” (38). Yet his indignant grousing is interrupted as soon as he sees Ary, the lone female rider in the auction. Like the other onlookers, he is arrested by her confidence, and [h]e learned a lot from her in that moment that was just beyond the moment where the crowd might have laughed or swopped [sic] glances, dismissing her in some little way. He concluded rapidly: In order to get

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in where you didn’t belong you had to be good enough first, and next you had to be sure enough. She was good and she was sure, and his heart which had feared for her discredit, beat proud and quiet within him in time with the proud tread of the hooves. (38)

Amos’s response to Ary is dramatic: instead of focusing on the ways in which he is being disregarded, he realizes what he must do to gain authority, and, as importantly, he moves from a position of alienation to one of improbable sympathy. It is not surprising, then, when he later petitions God, “I’ve got to have that land. I’ve got to have Ary Morgan”: both the land and Ary become entwined in Amos’s vision of his transformation (47). God does seem to intervene when Amos encounters a stranger named Wu Tang Jones who is willing to trade six hundred acres of Delta land, which he has won in a poker tournament, for Amos’s small store in Lacey.34 Amos heads out to this uncharted territory immediately, and it is here that we see Amos echoing Thomas Sutpen’s maniacal campaign to reshape the land, leading teams of black field hands in stints of physical endurance that are both unconventional in their conception and unprecedented in their remarkable efficiency. Amos is joined by Thelma Dubard who transforms the small house on the property as Amos converts the land: abandoned by her husband and invited to stay by Amos, Thelma takes the dirty, bare rooms and creates a warm, nourishing space. Although an unlikely couple, they seem to have achieved a degree of domestic happiness that might satiate them both. Yet Amos cannot be content with this notion of home: even as he is prepared to shoot Thelma’s husband if he comes to reclaim her, Amos sees himself as biding time until he can “obtain” Ary, just as he has obtained the land. On a brief visit to Yacona for his father’s funeral, he fervently tries to explain himself to his father’s body: “The time’s not come for her, for Ary Morgan; but if I get her too, wouldn’t you take it for a Sign? A Sign that I was right to leave, that I worked well, that Ephraim was wrong?” (76). Thus, even though he has a growing plantation and a devoted partner, Amos does not feel that his destiny has been fulfilled: he must have Ary to validate the notion of home that drives him. Amos does, in fact, “get Ary too,” and while, in some ways, she seems to fall into his hands just as improbably as the land has, in fact, like Amos, she is driven to the relationship by a powerful new vision of home; ironically, however, we see that in marrying Amos, Ary is trying to flee from the plantation tradition that Amos is using as his marker for success. When Amos first attempts to court Ary, riding for

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hours in a stiff suit on a rented mule to join the gaggle of suitors at Dellwood each Sunday, Ary pays little attention to him: not unexpectedly, Amos seems like a poor imitation of the jocular, well-mannered men who flock to woo Ary and her sister. When Amos abandons his attempts to compete on the Morgans’ terms, however, Ary sees him in a new light: when she hears that he is “working like a fiend and overalls and busted shoes and a straw hat” from a family friend who views Amos as a comical “red-neck,” Ary is intrigued rather than repulsed (129). She cites in herself “an excess of the Morgan complaint. I was a romantic, like them; but I craved a hardier romance than they seemed to offer” (131). In Amos’s stubborn reclamation of the land, then, she sees a ruggedness that the cultivated suitors who come to Dellwood—and, indeed, Dellwood itself—cannot possibly offer. In short, Amos offers an alternative to home that is previously unimaginable to Ary. Thus, their shared focus on—if competing visions of—home wholly dictates Ary and Amos’s decision to marry. Amos, of course, sees Ary as the divine endorsement of the home he is building, and Ary regards Amos as posing an irrefutable challenge to the mores of Dellwood. She has always believed herself to be reacting to—rather than being reflected in—the southern tradition that defined daily life in her family home: she is not as beautiful as her sister Louise, who occupies a position so privileged that Ary contends she embodies “what Morgan men meant by Morgan women,” and as a result, Ary has forged an alternate identity as “the strong one,” the unconventional daughter whose willfulness will exempt her from the expectations of Morgan womanhood (121, 122). When she comes to Amos’s plantation to witness his progress, they barely exchange words. Upon seeing Ary ride up, Amos simply asks her if she likes the plantation and then offers it to her on the spot. Her response is immediate and powerful: “He thought he meant it: he said it to be believed, and I believed him. My strength flared up again in bright relief against him, the wilderness, the raw fields. I heard the words within me: I have come home” (130). Amos has created an environment in which Ary’s strength is both mirrored and matched, and Ary quickly identifies herself as home. Thus, the conventional markers of romance seem unnecessary here: as Amos’s friend Arney Talliafero muses, “I wonder sometimes if she ever said a word about what they want to call love. Or if Amos did either for that matter” (88). Love seems inconsequential for a successful marriage; instead, both Amos and Ary are driven by what they see as a recognition of their essential selves and by their desire to reflect these selves in a home of their own creation.

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Yet, as we quickly realize, Ary and Amos’s marriage is strained not only by their divergent views of home but, as significantly, by Amos’s inconsistent vision of the homeplace he is trying to fashion. While Ary is impressed by Amos’s unrelenting determination in creating a hyper-archetypal form of home, often Amos’s enormous will seems to have run amok: while he is certain of what he does not want his home to be, he often seems at a loss for what it is he is trying to create. As a result, Amos regularly assails the very notions that underlie universal constructions of home. This tendency is clear even before his marriage to Ary: first, he dismisses Thelma in order to marry Ary, undeterred by the fact that after creating a home for him, Thelma is now homeless, and although she is now an obstacle to what he contends is his destiny, she is also pregnant with his child. He also chases off Arney Tallifero, who has come from Yacona to tell Amos about the death of his father and ends up living with Amos and Thelma for more than a year, “latch[ing] up together nice enough” in an approximation of family (91). Arney, however, functions as a vocal defender of the values of Yacona, and he accuses Amos of violating his childhood values when Amos “lowrate[s] his folks,” and, even more dramatically, when he dismisses Thelma (91). When Arney leaves, Amos further affronts him by accusing him of stealing the money Amos had made in his family’s grocery store, money Amos proudly asserts was earned “against Ephraim . . . against Yacona and the name of Dudley” (98). Presumably, Arney is as offended that Amos prizes money that is borne of loathing for their childhood home as he is outraged that he is erroneously labeled a thief. Both Thelma’s and Arney’s departures, then, speak to the ways in which Amos has little understanding of the home is trying to create. Troublingly, Amos seems unable to identify the elements of his early experiences that might translate into the vision he is forging; certainly, he seems to place little value in the sorts of family connections usually central to home. Thus, while he is haunted by each leave-taking, even chasing after Arney through swampland infested with “mosquitoes and varmits and every type of critter” in order to entreat him to return, Amos seems almost helpless against his own megalomaniacal impulses (99). If Amos spends his first years in the Delta trying to eradicate traces of his own family’s legacy, then after he and Ary are married he seems determined to stamp out the Morgan influence on his plantation. While he emulates their lifestyle, he continues to be threatened by the tradition the Morgans represent, and the twin desires to create and destroy, so clearly manifested in his relationships with Thelma and Arney, become even more exaggerated in his relationship with Ary,

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and, ultimately, their children. This dichotomy is solemnly noted by Ary in her “indictment” (the label given to each first-person narration in the novel) when she observes, “[H]e is death. He has to possess and what he possesses he has to destroy” (201). We see this pattern evinced in his relationship with his niece, Dolly. She has come to live with Ary and Amos when her mother, Ary’s sister Louise, dies, and Amos adores her. Dolly, in turn, idolizes Amos, initially seeing his home as “the heart of happiness” (103). Yet she grows to fear Amos after he violently opposes Ary’s parents’ proposal that she be sent to finishing school, dramatically tearing up their letter of inquiry and creating a family rift that does not heal. Amos’s instinct seems to be sound—Dolly is a gentle spirit who will not fare well in such a refined environment—but Ary correctly identifies his actions as selfinterested rather than protective, accusing him, “You cannot say you did it because you love her” (115). Indeed, Amos confesses that he has acted “for myself” (116). Thus, wounding the Morgans is more important to Amos than defending Dolly, and he seems unconcerned that Dolly and Ary are hurt in the process. In the days that follow, Dolly understands what it means to exist in tension with Amos rather than harmony: she concludes, “In separation many became weak, and many became meaningless. I was both” (116). Instead of suffering in this condition, she “surrenders” and leaves, understanding that if one is to be a part of Amos’s home, one must exist in complete sympathy with his vision. Dolly’s departure prefigures the absence of Ary and Amos’s eldest children, both of whom choose routes inconsistent with Amos’s worldview. Elinor, Amos and Ary’s spirited older daughter, initially seems to follow closely in her father’s model: she is an expert horsewoman, relying not only on an innate gift but on “long discipline” that takes the form of “[uncounted] hours poured into the work . . . in the search for perfection” (134). Yet Elinor enrages her father when he catches her hitting her horse trainer in the face with a bridle because the trainer has barbed a horse’s throat and poured red pepper under its tail to give it a “new lease on life” (134). Amos sees his daughter’s treatment of the trainer as brutal and unjustified, but just as importantly, he perceives in Elinor a haughtiness that recalls a young Ary, and he imagines a meaningful bond between himself and the trainer. He takes Elinor’s horses, her greatest joy, and sells them immediately, and she leaves the Dudley house forever. Ary contends that Amos is not remorseful but “restless,” a sense of agitation that is resolved only when he has the opportunity to reproach his eldest son, Winston, as well (135).

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If Elinor deviated from Amos’s example, Winston never resembled his father at all: unlike the intense Elinor, Winston is a blithe spirit, a young man defined by his “laughing, forever unjaded face” (133). And if Elinor is determined to work for her accomplishments, Winston seems uninterested in either exertion or accolades: Ary notes that Winston was “so prodigal with time from birth that when Amos says he slept sixteen years I can find no defense for him . . .” (132). Yet, while Ary identifies him as “less like me” than Elinor is, she also characterizes Winston as “more my own,” and it is suggested that Amos is determined to quash the Morgan aspects of his nature (134). After Winston has crashed his first car, Amos denies him a second, saying, “Let him do the borrowing for a change” (133). Winston does borrow a car and crashes it, dying suddenly. The enormous losses of Elinor and Winston merit just a few pages in Ary’s narrative, but their absence seems to haunt her in ways that it does not appear to affect Amos. Ary notes that upon Winston’s death, which occurs in the same year as Elinor’s departure, Amos speaks “as though he had waited for just that event,” proclaiming that “We’re going to start living like white folks,” and he works to upgrade his plantation even further, surrounding it with white fences and populating it with the very best livestock (135). Moreover, he names the town “Dudley,” after himself, extending his authority beyond his own plantation’s borders. Thus, while Amos may indeed be devastated by the loss of his children, he is also recommitted to his vision, one that may have been stalled by two heirs whom he deemed inadequate. After their deaths, however, Amos seems obsessed with replacing Elinor and Winston with more suitable substitutes, and his desire for a true heir—one who will exist wholly in Amos’s model—leads to increasingly erratic and destructive behavior. First, he insists that, despite their relatively advanced age, he and Ary must have another child, and when she suffers a miscarriage, he intimates that she has lost the baby (who he is certain is a boy) on purpose.35 When Ary falls into a deep depression after the loss, Amos focuses on their youngest daughter, Mary Louise, named in honor of Ary’s sister. Amos encourages her to rename herself, not only to eliminate any Morgan influence, but presumably to remake her in his own image: just as he has baptized himself, Mary Louise will rename (and recreate) herself. Tellingly, as critic Terry Roberts has observed, after her rechristening Mary Louise, now Dinah Lee, “begins to resemble subtly the son [Amos] desired” when she adopts a uniform of jeans and men’s shirts (Self and Community 28). Yet, despite her devotion to her father, Dinah can never be a son, and thus when a young drifter, Joe

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Ferguson, arrives on the plantation and quickly ingratiates himself to Amos, he is welcomed as a son and potential heir. In fact, Joe intimates that he is indeed Amos’s real son, the grown child of Thelma Dubard, yet this is an impossible claim to substantiate: Joe is a practiced liar who has heard a great deal about Amos after meeting Arney Talliafero in a bar in New Orleans. Yet Amos seems not to dig too deeply into Joe’s story either to prove or disprove his paternity, and, instead, in a move that speaks to Amos’s increasing desperation and mania, encourages a romance between Dinah and Joe: he believes it is through their union—his Morgan-born daughter and his wayward son—that he will produce a true heir. Outraged by Amos’s behavior and distraught by Dinah’s likely incest (as well as her humiliation and heartbreak when Joe also sleeps with a black field hand), Ary shoots Joe Ferguson. The murder is, in many ways, the inevitable culmination of the gothic threads of the narrative: just like the house of Thomas Sutpen, which collapses under the weight of Sutpen’s colossal intentions and the moral and social transgressions necessary for their realization, Amos’s self-fashioned home is marked by bitterness, incest, miscegenation, death, and now murder. Yet Ary’s shooting of Joe does not destroy Amos, as Bon’s murder cripples Sutpen; instead, it brings about an unexpected renewal—Amos is able to imagine home as a construct with family at its center. This dramatic shift in Amos’s character is all the more surprising because it is not recounted in the form of an “indictment”—the mode of the three other narratives that comprise the bulk of the novel—but as a largely indulgent and occasionally remorseful reverie in Amos’s own voice, which is surprisingly wry. Thus, as almost all of the novel’s critics have observed, the ending of the novel breaks from its tragic arc and takes a decidedly comic turn.36 Yet, through the unexpected levity of the novel’s conclusion, This Crooked Way finds its way back to the traditional construction of home that was at the center of Fire in the Morning. Immediately after he has “buried” Joe by pushing him and his car into the river (a scene that acts as an inversion of Amos’s baptism), Amos finds the money that he believed Arney had stolen decades earlier: these events, taken together with his “son’s” death, cause Amos’s certainty about home and its inherent evils and injustices to evaporate, and he heads to Yacona. His homecoming is disrupted, however, by the fact that Yacona has been leveled for a new federal dam project. Instead of his homestead, Amos encounters “an empty waste full of raw dirt, soft and loose with no grass growing all around”; his contested home is now a hole (231). Amos comes upon a friendly construction

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worker who assures him, “If you’re from the Delta, you ought to be right glad they’ve put all these hill rivers in harness. Dam the hills to save the Delta. That’s what they say” (234). Yet for Amos, who has damned the hills to create a Delta home for himself, such a conclusion does not seem certain. The past he has attempted to dismiss and the cultural inheritance he has denied haunt him in the glaring absence of his first home and the seeming failure of the new home he has created. He is trapped by two empty homes—one literal and the other spiritual—and is desperate to find something authentic. Thus, while Amos muses that “I ought to have spent my life . . . drinking a little bit here and yonder, working a little bit here and there” he ultimately embraces the traditional values of home: he finds his longestranged brother Ephraim and his family and, in their presence, he is re-baptized (235). Hence, Amos is “born again” once more, and this new incarnation is marked not by a desire for independence, but a sense of reconciliation with the conventions of home that he had violently rejected in leaving Yacona. In the novel’s final pages, he brings Ephraim’s extended family—sixteen people in a ramshackle convoy—back to his plantation to live with him. Yet, as critic Elsa Nettels notes, “Whether the influx of relatives signifies the redemption of Amos, the union of Amos and Ary, or the triumph of the Dudleys over the Morgans, the final scene is a comic, not a tragic, resolution of the action” (77). Nettels’s offhanded reference to the ambiguous nature of the novel’s conclusion is telling: at points during Amos’s narrative, Spencer seems to invite each of the readings that Nettles lists here. Most interesting among them, I think, is the suggestion that Amos and Ary have found one another on equal footing. Certainly Amos’s narrative implies that he sees this recalibration of power: he explains that one of his adult dreams was to “see Ary’s face again like I saw it that first day above a horse’s mane . . . She was equal to me then and a little bit more” (221). As she sits, unrepentant, after shooting Joe, he is able to glimpse her extraordinary confidence once again. In her section of the novel, Ary, too, seems to suggest that the shooting will bring them together: when Amos discovers what she has done, she explains, “I was not afraid, but my heart picked up speed, racing faster and faster, like a bride’s heart paced to the setting sun” (218). Thus, Terry Roberts contends that the shooting may be “the beginning of their true intimacy. In murdering Joe Ferguson, the offspring of their differences, she has freed each to accept the other” (Self and Community 29). Yet I would argue that Amos’s homecoming does not signify a marriage on their own terms or the sort of idealized home they imagined when they first

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decided to marry. Rather, while Amos has put aside his despotic ways, in bringing all of the Dudleys to Dudley, the town of his creation, he is merely replicating traditional notions of home: he will function as the benevolent patriarch and Ary, despite the agency suggested in her shooting of Joe Ferguson, chooses to adopt the role of gracious hostess to the Dudleys, a move that suggests she will also serve as a dutiful wife to Amos. Thus, while we encounter a “redeemed” Amos in the novel’s concluding pages, we also find that his remorse has led to a very specific triumph: he has abandoned his vision of a unique destiny and accepted a more conventional form of home. As a result, like Fire in the Morning, This Crooked Way ultimately celebrates a traditional, patriarchal notion of home, one that in this case offers a redemptive shelter in addition to securing identity. * * * If the first two Mississippi novels demonstrate a strict adherence to traditional southern values and the Renaissance aesthetic, Spencer’s final Mississippi novel, The Voice at the Back Door, is generally seen as departing from this model. Most obviously, the novel’s direct treatment of racial issues in the burgeoning Civil Rights era deviates sharply from the more understated attention to—or, at times, blatant neglect of—issues of race in Fire in the Morning and This Crooked Way: in its depiction of Duncan Harper’s decision to defend African Americans’ rights in Winfield County, Mississippi, the novel was, and continues to be, viewed as a “bold refusal to countenance the status quo” (Greene, “Spencer’s Voice” 333). The novel challenges conventions in less overt ways as well: while on its surface, The Voice at the Back Door follows the blueprint established by Spencer’s earlier novels—it, too, focuses on a male protagonist earnestly contemplating his place in the stoic model, and, like its predecessors, the novel is resolved through an extraordinary act of violence that triggers communal healing—The Voice at the Back Door is not as quick to dismiss the problematic aspects of this “formula”; indeed, the uncertainties about southern cultural and literary orthodoxies that interleave both Fire in the Morning and This Crooked Way are amplified in Spencer’s third (and final) Mississippi novel.37 Thus, while in many regards The Voice at the Back Door still displays the unmistakable imprint of Fugitive-Agrarian influence, the cautiously progressive social agenda that marks the novel is echoed in Spencer’s larger reconsideration of the traditional values of southern identity and, as importantly, its reverence of home.38

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This may be illustrated most clearly in the novel’s opening scene: Travis Brevard, the Winfield County, Mississippi, sheriff, frantically drives to the town square of Lacey, the county seat, after suffering a heart attack. “I only wanted to get home to Lacey,” he explains to Duncan Harper, the one time football hero-turned-grocer who becomes Brevard’s unlikely political heir (8). Brevard does make it to town, but once there he finds that he cannot identify a more specific home. He explains, “I would not go home to Miss Ada . . . I tell you for a fact Duncan, I been married to Miss Ada for thirty-odd year, but I couldn’t ever age her. She’s nothing but a little girl and, God forgive me, but I’d rather die in a gully than on her bedspread” (9). He is equally inclined to protect his black mistress, Ida Belle: “Her place is where I could go out quiet as a match . . . but it would most likely embarrass her to have my corpse on her hands. You can’t tell what they’re liable to do to a nigger. She might have to leave town” (9). Brevard’s predicament both triggers and prefigures the novel’s central conflict: he anoints Duncan Harper his successor, thus compelling Duncan to address the deep—and often paradoxical—divisions created in the town by race. Just as importantly, however, Brevard’s ruminations reveal a subtle shift in Spencer’s treatment of home. Like the characters who inhabit the first two Mississippi novels, Brevard recognizes home as crucial to identity: to die away from home is unthinkable. Yet, Brevard ultimately cannot recognize an authentic home, and as a result, he dies in Duncan’s store, coming “home to Lacey” in only the most general sense. In The Voice at the Back Door’s initial scene, then, Spencer underscores the fact that home can no longer be identified as clearly as it could in Fire in the Morning, in which family history defined place, or in This Crooked Way, in which the land rooted its occupants; instead, in Spencer’s third novel, home, even in its most basic construction, is unexpectedly fraught. A pervasive anxiety about the potentially unstable nature of home continues past these first pages and, in fact, defines the novel’s larger plot structures: it is manifest most obviously in Duncan’s push for civil rights, which triggers a passionate schism in Lacey, but it is also evident in the novel’s secondary plot, in which Duncan pursues an affair with his ex-fiancée, Marcia Mae Hunt, and thus creates a fissure in his own home as well. As a result, the political and personal threads that comprise The Voice at the Back Door are in constant tension with one another, and some vision of home is under siege in almost every scene of the novel. It is for this reason that while the majority of critics have characterized the novel’s dramatic treatment of southern race relations as a departure for Spencer, I see The Voice at the Back Door as intricately connected

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to the themes of Spencer’s earlier work. In fact, I contend that the novel’s consideration of race is significant not only for its challenge to southern mores, but because it suggests new ways of framing questions about the legitimacy of the vision of home that Spencer had proposed in the first two Mississippi novels. Certainly, at first glance, the novel does not appear to offer a particularly complex understanding of home, as Spencer has populated the novel with a series of characters who seem to take severe, often stereotypical, stances on the value of the southern home. Chief among them is Duncan Harper, who defends his decision to stay in Lacey in the novel’s opening pages, telling the dying Travis Brevard, who has accused him of neglecting his potential, If you think I couldn’t have gone anywhere else and done better, you’re mistaken. Even after the war, there were plenty of people over the state that remembered me [as a football hero]. The fact is I decided to stay in Lacey because I wanted to. My wife likes it here, and I like it. There’s always been a Harper on the town square . . . The people I grew up with are all here, and my father’s friends that are left alive. I want my children to grow up here. I don’t see anything wrong with that. (11)

Thus Duncan is positioned as a loyal servant to Lacey’s tradition, a man who has eschewed opportunity for the more basic pleasures of the stable home, and who relishes the simplicity suggested by southern identity. Like Kinloch Armstrong, Duncan Harper’s model in this construction of manhood is his stoic father, Henry, who is described repeatedly by both his family and the citizens of Lacey as “a gentleman.” Duncan contends that it was “in [Henry’s] mild grasp that the stability of the family lay,” and, while we see very little of Henry in the novel, we sense that Duncan seeks to emulate his father’s benevolent paternalism and enduring steadiness (203). For example, Duncan’s choice of a career as a grocer and his marriage to the modest Tinker Taylor, who adheres to very traditional ideals of southern womanhood, represent his investment in a neo-Victorian ethos associated with the South of his father’s era (203).39 In such a reading, Duncan’s most radical foil is Marcia Mae Hunt, who had dated him steadily throughout high school and college, and then, in a sudden disruption of Duncan’s expectations and a “violation” of the town’s imagination, dumped him for Red O’Donnell, a near stranger, whose twin appeals are that he is an exotic—“a Yankee, redheaded Irishman” who has “no consciousness of families, small towns, roots, ties, or any sort of custom”—and that he is willing

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to take her far from Lacey (39, 198). Even after her return to Lacey following Red’s death, Marcia Mae is focused on escape from the town’s grasp. She regularly rails against Lacey’s small-mindedness and hypocrisy, and fantasizes about a life defined primarily by its negation of Lacey’s mores; for example, in one scene she wistfully tells Duncan, I wish . . . that I was anybody’s secretary in some big city. And that every morning I got up and put on a gray suit and a clean white blouse and went to work in a beautiful soundproof air-conditioned office one hundred and one floors up, with streamlined filing cabinets and a noiseless electric typewriting. I wish I had a little apartment with a view if nothing but skyscraper tops. Then I would be happy. (122)

Marcia Mae’s longing for absolute anonymity here stands in almost perfect contrast with Duncan’s desire for the intimacy of Lacey, and thus the two characters seem to enact a tidy bifurcation of the conflicting impulses associated with Quentin Compson. Yet despite their exaggerated—and, indeed, fairly clichéd—evaluations of home, in truth both Duncan and Marcia Mae are defined by a shared, if deeply buried, ambivalence.40 Marcia Mae, for example, despite her undeniable loathing of Lacey, unexpectedly returns to the town shortly after the death of her husband. Peggy Prenshaw ascribes her homecoming to an almost animal instinct, drawing a parallel to Marcia Mae’s observation that something in dogs’ blood drives them to return to home, even if they have been treated cruelly there (ES 59). Certainly, this helps to explain Marcia Mae’s genuine bewilderment at her own actions: staring into the mirror of her childhood room, a space in which little has changed, she wonders, “Why did I come back home? . . . Why did I?” (42). Yet Marcia Mae is not merely the victim of some indefinable biological urge to migrate home; indeed, in adopting the roles of dutiful daughter and heartbroken widow upon her return, neither of which accurately reflects her relationship with her parents or her marriage to Red O’Donnell, Marcia Mae recognizes that she is choosing to assume a “stage presence” in which she opts not to pose a serious challenge to the strict expectations of her family and the larger community (40). She repeatedly voices consternation at these social restrictions, saying at one point that “I think other people are trying to make me say I’m wrong whether I think so or not. I’ve always hated that about Lacey. They all know how right they are. Anybody who disagrees is wrong” (187). Yet, despite this outburst, Marcia Mae is careful never to openly defy community mores: she chooses to

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remain largely silent during political discussions, for example, and, she conducts her relationship with Duncan in secret. Thus, throughout the novel she remains a frustrated, if largely unexplored presence, a woman whose intelligence and enormous will are evident, but whose powerful need for home both complicates and obscures her in the reader’s imagination. Duncan, on the other hand, appears at first to be a remarkably transparent figure, one who is defined almost entirely by his unrelenting straightforwardness; in fact, Duncan claims to be immune to the paradoxes of passion—either personal or political—explaining, “Things seem pretty obvious to me, by and large,” and noting that he finds people who are driven primarily by their desires to be utterly alien to him: “ ‘They are taken and swept by things inside them— here.’ He laid a hand across his breast. ‘It must be that I hardly know how they feel’ ” (304). Indeed, Duncan seems fundamentally unaffected by others’ inconsistencies, repeatedly choosing to follow the intellectual and emotional courses he has charted for himself rather than to probe the murkier waters that his friends and colleagues inhabit. This is clearest, perhaps, in his relationship with Marcia Mae: in Duncan’s repeated refusals to try to comprehend Marcia Mae’s angst, both in their youthful past and during the period of their adult reunion, we see that he is not only rejecting her concerns but actively, if obdurately, clinging to the oversimplified notion of community that has guided him in adolescence into his adulthood. While we are privy to their initial courtship only through their personal and shared recollections in the novel, a clear picture arises of their earlier relationship: Marcia Mae’s desire to leave Lacey reaches its peak ten years before the novel is set when her brother, Everett, dies in what might be viewed as a form of passive suicide, a response to his family’s unwillingness to accept—or even acknowledge—his homosexuality. Infuriated by her family’s complicity in Everett’s death and her inability to grieve openly, she explains to Duncan that (as she paraphrases ten years later), “We could not stay in the South and be free. In the South, it’s nothing but family, family. We couldn’t breathe even, until we left” (194). He responds to Marcia Mae’s charge by ignoring both her anger and her appeal to leave town, and when this is not successful he explains that he can’t leave because he owns property and is invested in businesses in Lacey. Despite his self-identification as an uncommonly content man, Duncan cannot be so lacking in imagination as to be incapable of understanding her frustration; rather, he stubbornly refuses to allow Marcia Mae to challenge his view of Lacey as an ideal home: as she cites its suffocating tendencies as a reason for

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leaving, he identifies entanglements as a reason for staying. Unlike Marcia Mae, Duncan seems unwilling to calculate the costs inherent in the sense of community he imagines. Part of that cost, of course, also includes Marcia Mae, who, in a move that continues to confound Duncan a decade later, leaves him for the freedom that Red O’Donnell promises. Yet when Marcia Mae and Duncan resume their relationship, this time as an illicit affair, the couple is once again doomed to fail because of their divergent attitudes toward Lacey, and the South in general. After Marcia Mae has decried the South repeatedly, Duncan thinks to himself, “She did see something different from what he saw, and had tried in vain to show it to him; like pointing out something on the distant edge of a wood, the effort had come to nothing . . . He did not believe . . . that you escaped anything when you left Lacey and the South” (202). It is this conclusion, rather than doubt over the authenticity of his love for Marcia Mae or, equally compellingly, his guilt over betraying Tinker, that leads him to end the affair. Thus, his decision to break things off with Marcia Mae, which, tellingly, concludes a section of the novel entitled, “The Way Back Home,” demonstrates a logic that is simultaneously startling in the context of the affair and predictable in terms of Duncan’s history: He considered that he knew himself by certain things, by their certain manner of being themselves that identified them with his deepest self. He wanted positively now, to go home to his wife and children. Duncan Harper was a citizen of Lacey, that was it. Just answering a question about love could not alter this fact. Just saying “Come away” could not change it. It was his strongest and final quality. (205)

In short, Duncan ends the affair because he is a “good citizen”; ultimately, he is driven not by love for Marcia Mae or for Tinker, but for a need to be in a recognizable home. In such a view, citizenship supplants passion or even personal morality. If we look at the “facts” of Duncan’s personal decisions, then, it is relatively easy to dismiss him merely as a straight arrow, a bit of a literalist who is devoted to doing “what’s right,” as he says, and thus to view his later decisions to enforce the laws of Lacey and defend African Americans’ civil rights as an extension of this single-mindedness (140). However, Duncan’s personal choices are more complex than they appear, and, ultimately, we may use Duncan’s subtle ambivalence to reread his political actions as well. For example, in one of his repeated paeans to the simple life he seeks, Duncan explains that he desires

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nothing more than “to walk in the woods on Sunday with my family” (303). But there is great irony in this seemingly earnest claim, in that it is on one such Sunday walk, with his son, Cotton, at his side, that he begins his affair with Marcia Mae. Thus, while Duncan may identify the weekly hike as the central image of his identity as a family man and virtuous citizen, in fact this image is dramatically inverted when he leaves his son engaged in a supposedly joint dam-building exercise in the woods—a father-son activity that notably grants Cotton “majestic securities” (128)—and meets Marcia Mae for the first of several sexual encounters. This is significant not only because Duncan violates his wedding vows and paternal obligations while engaged in an activity that he touts as the centerpiece of domestic satisfaction, but because in reframing his Sunday “walk in the woods” as a tryst with Marcia Mae, who he knows holds contempt for Lacey, he is also flirting with a recognition of that “something on the distant edge of a wood”—the damaging nature of the South—that she points out to him and that he later insists he cannot comprehend. In short, in pursuing Marcia Mae in this manner, he is betraying not only Tinker (a literal view of the situation that Duncan might acknowledge) but the view of himself he has held since he was a young man and that has become further ossified by his choices to stay in Lacey, to marry Tinker, and to run his father’s grocery store. We see in his first dalliance with Marcia Mae, then, an ambivalence toward home that is never evident in his thought or speech. This deep-seated uncertainty is crucial to understanding Duncan’s tenure as sheriff, too. Many critics have cited Duncan’s improbable role as a liberal reformer as an outgrowth of his inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to acknowledge the ugliness of the racism that pervades Lacey and Winfield County. Indeed, even Spencer herself has stated that If he had been any more complex, he wouldn’t have taken such a firm simple stand. He pushes everything forward to the breaking point. I think that a man who sees things in such simplistic terms—who says, for example, “this is good and therefore I will do it”—a man like that has a flaw in his character. It’s a failure in his character that he could never perceive evil. Duncan Harper was necessary to the book, of course; but he’s not as interesting to me as a mixed character like Jimmy Tallant or even Beck Dozer. (Broadwell and Hoag 62)

I would argue, however, that while Duncan is certainly not as sophisticated as Jimmy Tallant and Beck Dozer—those “mixed characters”

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who can identify and even manipulate the competing cultural pressures that are placed upon them—he is driven by the same paradoxical forces as they are. In some ways, such a claim seems unlikely, primarily because, unlike Duncan Harper, Jimmy Tallant and Beck Dozer both exist on the periphery of Lacey’s society: Jimmy has chosen to be a café owner and bootlegger, operating both inside and outside the law. This position echoes his larger, “most uncertain,” status in the community: he is a war hero, but, more importantly in the eyes of Lacey, he is also the son of the man who led a massacre of twelve innocent African Americans a generation before, creating a sense of shame that continues to haunt Jimmy (71). Beck Dozer, who has formed an improbable alliance with Jimmy, is the son of one of the men who was killed in the massacre, and, despite the fact that he is more educated and more widely traveled than almost anyone in Lacey, his blackness disenfranchises him even more dramatically than Jimmy’s history does. Because of this marginalization, both men are free to explore their status as mixed characters, figures who are uneasy fits in all of the milieus that they inhabit. Duncan, on the other hand, is more limited in the ways in which he is invited to see himself: in choosing to follow his father’s footsteps, he has adopted the rigid model of southern male stoicism, which, as we have seen in Daniel and Kinloch Armstrong, for example, depends more upon action than introspection and demands a firm faith rather than an exploration of ambiguity. Yet, while Kinloch Armstrong’s earnest desire to inherit the stoic mantle of his father is also evident in Duncan Harper, the cultural bequest that seemed inevitable in Fire in the Morning becomes impossible in The Voice at the Back Door; while Kinloch needs only to discover the past in order to fully understand Tarsus as home, Duncan must also come to terms with a radically changing present. Certainly, as The Voice at the Back Door is careful to note, it is not merely race relations that are changing in the South; indeed the entire South is in flux, a fact that is illustrated by the obvious emptiness of much of its mythic iconography: we are shown that the “true South” has been replaced by a sea of “imitation southern colonial houses” decorated in faux “ ‘Gone-with-the-Wind lamp[s] right in the center of the window[s],” for example (79). And the stoic model upon which Duncan has based much of his identity is revealing itself to be equally hollow. Action has been replaced largely by discussion—Tinker tells Jimmy that Duncan and his friend Kerney Woolbright “sit and talk by the hour . . . niggers, politics, Truman, the South . . .”—yet we see that these conversations are also limited in nature: at one point the men

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fall “silent for a moment, knowing in common with all Southerners that when the knot got too tangled it was just as well left alone” (33, 31). In the “new South” of small-town Mississippi, then, action is impossible, yet so is meaningful communal reflection. This stasis is, in fact, productive for many in Lacey: Kerney, for example, is an aspiring politician who can capitalize on citizen’s uncertainty and feelings of powerlessness. And even Jimmy and Beck, who are accustomed to ambiguity, are able to navigate Lacey’s unpredictable social and political currents in ways that profit them. Yet Duncan finds himself relatively straitjacketed, wedded to ideas of “right” and home that are no longer rooted in clear meanings. His rigidness, then, is not merely a marker of his simplicity, but rather it reflects the absence of any outlet for exploring his paradoxical feelings about Lacey and southern identity as a whole.41 In his position as sheriff, then, Duncan has stumbled into a role that should reify and reward this kind of narrow vision: he is charged with implementing the laws of Winfield County, and thus, actively preserving the stable home that he reveres. He embraces the position because, as he says, “this county has run down till it’s a grand mess,” and having a hand in restoring it to its former glory—presumably that of his father’s age—will give Duncan great pleasure (25). Yet, even the role of sheriff requires a notable degree of cultural maneuvering, as evidenced by Travis Brevard’s tenure. Duncan, among others, saw Brevard’s standards as “too easygoing,” to phrase it rather euphemistically, and certainly, Brevard’s tenure was marked by a series of gross hypocrisies: he accepted protection money from Jimmy Tallant while appearing to be intolerant of bootlegging, for example, and allowed an African American man to bleed to death while keeping Ida Belle as his mistress (25). However, even while engaging in such openly corrupt acts, Brevard may be seen as maintaining Lacey’s mores: his brand of order is rooted in a set of social laws that often had little to do with the recorded law. For example, when Duncan explains that he will enforce prohibition laws as sheriff (even though that means curtailing his own appreciation of an evening cocktail) Jimmy Tallant explains with a certain degree of exasperation that prohibition “isn’t what [the people of Winfield County] want. It’s just what they voted for . . . What they want is illegal whiskey” (emphasis Spencer’s 26). Here Jimmy states a truth of which Duncan is well aware: the laws of Winfield County often reflect a morality that its citizen find admirable in the abstract and untenable in reality. Brevard, then, nodded to these aspirations, yet chose to be “all about order . . . nothing about law,” in the words of Kerney Woolbright; in short, he enforced a set

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of informal laws that were understood rather than the formal laws that were codified. The effect of this is that while Brevard may not have been terribly concerned with his obligation to apply the law equitably in his daily dealings, he was deeply invested in preserving the power structure of the county, and thus his inconsistencies represent an unorthodox way of ensuring a version of the southern tradition that Duncan extols. Indeed, while many in Lacey expressed contempt for Brevard’s crassness and cruelties, most citizens also saw themselves as benefitting from his leadership, if only because it ensured stability. This is evident when Jason Hunt, Marcia Mae’s father and one of the town’s most important figures, balks at backing Duncan in his run for sheriff because he fears Duncan is “going to make a fool of us” by enforcing liquor laws and those that provide for the equality of African Americans (44); certainly, Hunt is suspicious of liberal endeavors, but more than anything else, he is wary of a push toward change that might expose Lacey’s traditions to mockery and threaten his position in the town. Similarly, those who might have the most to gain from a sea change in the sheriff’s office are equally uncertain about what that change might bring. As Beck Dozer explains to Duncan, “I prefer the status quo . . . [T]rying to trail along behind a white man of good will is like following along behind somebody on a tightrope” (137). Duncan may represent Beck’s best interests, but presumably Beck believes, like Jason Hunt, that Duncan is “experiment[ing] with dynamite” (48). Duncan’s “simplicity,” then, cannot fully account for his challenge to Lacey’s tradition. Certainly, he is trying to do “what’s right,” displaying the sort of basic, goal-oriented thinking that must have guided him in his days as a football star. Yet, for the first time in his life, Duncan is not acting as a team player, to continue the analogy. He finds that his understanding of the stoic model, which has led him to idealize Lacey as an unassailable home, stands in contrast to the larger cultural traditions that underpin that home. In short, once he becomes the county sheriff, Duncan must confront the slippages between the way he has envisioned Lacey and the ways in which the town actually operates, and the ambivalence that he has spent the majority of his life denying now defines him. Home, the ideal for which he has sacrificed everything—a more exciting career, marriage to Marcia Mae—is now no longer a space of stability, but of disturbing uncertainty, and this awareness guides Duncan as much as his simple desire to “do what’s right.”

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This complex transformation is triggered by a series of events that, while intricate, all stem from a series of political acts driven by entirely common motives, as Beck Dozer identifies them: “honor, pride, love, family, greed, passion, revenge, and hatred” (140). The scandal starts simply enough: when Duncan is appointed to be the sheriff, he decides that he will combat bootlegging and the illegal treatment of African Americans, both projects that stem from his desire to apply existing laws equitably. Duncan runs into trouble, however, when Jimmy Tallant and his business partner Bud Grantham, a gruff man from an unruly backwoods family prone to intimidation and violence, decide they will not let him shut down their roadhouse. Despite his friendship with Duncan (and his enduring, if unrequited, love for Tinker), Jimmy devises a plot to call attention to Duncan’s commitment to justice for African Americans, a stance that will arouse the suspicion of much of Winfield County, whose citizens range from unrepentant bigots to those who merely fear any action that smacks of progressivism. If Duncan’s sympathy for the Civil Rights movement is revealed, Tallant and Grantham reason, then Duncan will lose the election that would have given him a full term as sheriff to Willard Follansbee, the unscrupulous deputy who had served under Travis Brevard and who is now Tallant and Grantham’s choice as a straw man candidate. Jimmy enlists Beck Dozer in his plan, sending Beck to Duncan to request protective custody in the county jailhouse after Beck has supposedly instigated a knife fight with Bud Grantham. Jimmy then “raids” the jail, backed by a band of Granthams, to take a photograph of Duncan protecting Beck, which he proceeds to distribute to northern civil rights papers, successfully labeling Duncan as an impenitent liberal and ensuring that Duncan will lose the election. There a number of ironies inherent in this plot, chief among them the reality that Jimmy Tallant’s understanding of race is in many ways more progressive than Duncan Harper’s, a fact that is illustrated by each man’s relationship with Beck Dozer.42 When Jimmy and Beck first encounter one another as soldiers in Europe, they realize that they are tethered together by their personal histories, a shared narrative of fear and violence that is synecdocic for southern race relations in the early twentieth century. Jimmy is, of course, deeply ashamed of the fact that his father, Acey Tallant, murdered Beck’s father, an act Acey justified with little more than the claim, “I’m white and you’re black, that’s all you and me need to know,” and Jimmy eschews the reductive thinking that fueled his father’s hatred (254).43 Yet, until the very end of the novel, readers aren’t quite sure of Jimmy’s politics;

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we are only aware that as much as he is recognized for abiding by the “country code” that binds the mostly poor white men of Winfield County, he and Beck are linked by an understanding that is just as powerful, if equally obscure (45). Neither Beck nor Jimmy try to characterize this relationship in any specific way, but one of Beck’s observations is particularly telling: he notes that “there isn’t anything one of us thinks that the other hasn’t thought too” (139). Thus, the two men understand that they are intimately connected by shared experience and a deep sympathy. Significantly, the town of Lacey also respects this relationship, even if it remains relatively incomprehensible to them: when Jimmy explains that anyone who harms Beck must answer to him, one citizen of Lacey replies, “Well . . . if you took up a notion like that about Dozer, everybody would understand. You’d have a right to it” (345). In fact, the people of Lacey cannot really understand the nature of Jimmy’s loyalty to Beck, but, sensing its power, they do not question its legitimacy and they accommodate their unconventional friendship. Duncan, on the other hand, is vocal in his support for the Civil Rights movement, and, despite the fact that he lacks “a right to it” in the eyes of Lacey, and he has the courage to act on these beliefs, risking his reputation—and, ultimately, his life—in the name of the larger cause of racial justice. But Duncan’s relationship with Beck reveals inconsistencies in his attitude toward African Americans that are surprising given the political platform he has crafted.44 For example, when Duncan first meets Beck Dozer, before Jimmy has enlisted Beck in his plot to unseat him, Duncan treats him with more respect than other white men in Lacey might, listening to him in a relatively polite fashion; just as significantly, however, he also dismisses Beck’s complaint that he is disenfranchised from the voting process, stating simply, “That kind of talk’s no good . . . On your way boy” (19). Here, despite his “liberalism,” Duncan adopts the rhetoric of white authority, attempting both to silence Beck and to infantilize him. Interestingly, Beck does not back down in this exchange, but instead explains that he is the son of Robinson Dozer and invokes the massacre set in the courthouse that Duncan now occupies as sheriff. In light of Beck’s announcement, Duncan is struck by the collision of past and present injustices, and must reconsider Beck: “Oh, I see.” Their eyes met and though they were alone in an empty building, and no one knew they were there, it seemed that the world listened, that a new way of speaking was about to form in an old place. They were a little helpless too, like children waiting to be prompted.

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What should the words be? “There aren’t many people you ought to talk this way to,” Duncan said. The Negro almost smiled. “I know that” “It would help you to say, ‘Sir.’ ” “I realize that.” “On your way,” said Duncan. (19)

Even in this exchange, in which Beck and Duncan seem to see one another anew, Duncan is ultimately still guided by the language of “the old place”: when he insinuates that other whites might take issue with Beck’s bold manner, he seems more critical of Beck than of white Lacey, and he ends the conversation with the same curt dismissal with which it began. Thus, even if he senses that “a new way of speaking” is possible, unlike Jimmy, who is able to transcend southern racial conventions, Duncan seems unable to fully depart from the established scripts that have delineated race relations in the South for generations. This is significant because although Lacey increasingly characterizes Duncan as a liberal reformer, we see that Duncan is, in fact, less certain in his progressive stance than the community realizes. While he earnestly supports Civil Rights in theory, in fact he is unable to free himself entirely from the southern perspective that he dismisses as outdated, one that marginalizes blacks and even attributes “savage” impulses to them. Even as he is established as a moral crusader, driven primarily by an overly simplistic urge to “what’s right,” then, we see that Duncan is equally shaped by his own ambivalence even in this, the supposed ideological core of his challenge to community. As he heads into the election that will grant him a full term as sheriff, then, Duncan is caught up in a series of competing forces: most obviously, he wants to win the race to ensure that “good”— Duncan’s brand of benevolent paternalism—trumps the corruption represented by the Follansbee ticket. On the other hand, we see that in winning the election, Duncan may also disrupt the home he is presumably trying to defend, both in the larger sense—he is challenging Lacey’s long-standing beliefs—and in a more immediate sense—in seeking office, he is stirring up his own paradoxical attitudes toward home. These tensions become even more exaggerated when Jimmy Tallant is shot by a group New Orleans gangsters who want to set up a gambling operation in his roadhouse. Beck is nearby when Jimmy is shot and is quickly (mis)identified as the shooter. The community, initially outraged by Duncan’s protection of Beck after the sham knife fight with Grantham, now becomes mob-like in its desire to capture and punish Beck for the attack on Jimmy Tallant. Jimmy, always a bit

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of a cipher, refuses to reveal the name of the shooter, perhaps knowing that to do so would reveal his involvement, however tangential, to a crime syndicate and, just as importantly, would give Duncan credibility at a crucial time in the election process. As a result, Duncan must investigate the matter with only the help of Kerney Woolbright, who is running for state senate on a ticket with Duncan, while community anger grows. The situation comes to a head on “Speaking Day,” a day-long political rally attended by almost everyone in the county, an event in which the somewhat nebulous notion of “community” becomes realized in a very literal sense. It is here that Kerney correctly gauges Winfield County’s rage over Duncan’s progressive stance. Fearing for his own political career, he denounces Duncan from the podium, and then, even more reprehensibly, withholds a telegram that would have cleared Beck’s name in Jimmy’s shooting and thus revealed Duncan’s protection of Beck to be judicious rather than radical. For Duncan, who has suspected he might lose the election but who has continued to have faith in his methodical approach both to the Tallant-Dozer situation and to the campaign, this betrayal comes as a mortal blow. Not only has he been abandoned by his friend (and only ideological ally), but Kerney’s dismissal of Duncan has a powerful effect on the community: when Kerney, whose Yale education grants him an air of northern authority, announces he cannot condone Duncan’s liberal stance, in effect he validates the bigotry and anger that, until this point, lay relatively dormant beneath the surface of polite Winfield County. As Duncan drives home from the Speaking, he sees that the window to his grocery store has been smashed and his family’s name obscured by the hole the vandals have produced. In a matter of hours, then, Duncan has been utterly recast in the town’s consciousness and in his own: while for most of his life he had been a man who followed in his father’s footsteps and maintained the tradition of southern stoicism, he is now an outcast, an unwelcome presence in the community. Just as importantly, as the broken store window suggests, with this sudden turn of sentiment Duncan realizes that his cultural inheritance—along with his public identity—is subject to violent erasure. Duncan’s death comprises the dramatic climax of the novel: he is killed in an accident, possibly engineered by two country men, after he and Tinker invite Beck Dozer to sit in the front seat of their car when Duncan once again attempts to take Beck into protective custody. Yet I would argue that the real turning point of The Voice at the Back Door takes place well before Duncan’s martyrdom for civil

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rights: immediately after Kerney denounces him, Duncan declares to his family, “I always hated football . . . I never wanted to play” (303). This announcement is nothing less than shocking, a fact that is underscored when Tinker must console a frantic Cotton, assuring the boy that Duncan has misspoken. Not only does it represent a dismissal of traditional male values, but it calls into question Duncan’s public persona: he is recognized, even decades later, as a football star, and thus he is recognized and embraced by everyone in Lacey, and, indeed, much of the state. In renouncing this role, Duncan declares himself to be something other than a local hero; indeed, for the first time in the novel, he is depicted as someone who had dreams for himself outside of the community’s expectations of him. When he bitterly complains, “I never got to finish my Scout badge because of [the coach] and his football team,” Duncan seems on one level to be preoccupied with an incident that is almost comic in its triviality, yet, significantly, he also reveals that he is capable of envisioning an alternate path for himself, one dictated by his own long-repressed passions (303). It is this epiphany, then, that allows Duncan to finally reconsider home in a meaningful way. He is well aware of his fate: “[H]e knew now that he . . . would be seen in Lacey as an eccentric; possibly it would be the only way he could be tolerated. ‘He went off on the race question,’ they would say, as though he’d taken up some Oriental religion; ‘It was the strangest thing’ ” (332–33). Yet, ostracism doesn’t seem to terrify him, as it had during both phases of relationship with Marcia Mae, for example, and, in fact, he seems to half-welcome it. He thinks to himself, The people around Lacey who were said to be peculiar took up the major part of the town; but perhaps their peculiarity, whether acquired deliberately or incidentally, gave them what they wanted—it freed them from what people expected of them. He felt freer already. I can read more now, he thought [an activity banned by his football coach], and have a drink in the evenings after work . . . (333)

Instead of envisioning himself as the savior of the community, restoring Lacey in the mold of the true South, then, Duncan is able to reimagine himself outside of a communal context, and he is thrilled by the potential such a severance suggests. Indeed, it may be this image of himself, as much as his ideological leanings, that motivates him to invite Beck Dozer into the front seat of his car. As he faces the two country bigots, he thinks to himself, “So it comes down to this . . . To the tiniest decision you can make. To the slightest action. In

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front of people daring you to do what you believe in and they don’t” (emphasis Spencer’s, 335). While this moment is celebrated by critics as the novel’s most overt call for civil rights, it is also crucial in that Duncan explicitly positions himself in opposition to the community: we see him think in terms of “you” and “they,” rather than imagining a single community that must be coaxed into recognizing its true unity. Ultimately, however, Duncan’s new vision of himself is as naïve as his previous understanding of home, and, as Spencer demonstrates through the inevitability of Duncan’s death, tension between the self and community may be untenable. This theme is introduced earlier in the novel when Marcia Mae recalls her brother Everett’s deathbed delusions: Before he died . . . Everett thought there were soldiers out by the summerhouse. They were in ragged clothes, he said, all gathered around somebody or something on the ground, and talking, until one left and ran toward the house . . . The soldier went past the corner of the porch. Everett kept asking where he’d gone. Grandmother said that her mother told her how during the Civil War some soldiers had stopped on the lawn. One of them was sick and they were afraid he had cholera. They wouldn’t bring him in the house, but one of them finally asked for water and food. She couldn’t recall the rest of the story. (195)

Marcia Mae remarks on Everett’s story because it highlights the pathos of his death, but his hallucination also reveals the essential alienation of those who are marked as different—or advocate difference—in the South. His uncanny imagining of the soldier speaks to the ways in which Everett too has been denied access to home: Everett’s “sickness”—homosexuality—is not contagious, certainly, but it troubles the Hunts in the same way that cholera triggers anxiety in the troops, and, as critically, that Duncan’s stand for racial justice creates unease in Lacey. It is telling, then, that all three men—the diseased soldier, Everett, and Duncan—are displaced, physically or spiritually, and then die. The southern home cannot accommodate anything that might “contaminate” it or its traditional narrative. Thus, I tend to read the conclusion of The Voice at the Back Door less optimistically than critics such as Terry Roberts who contends that “Duncan Harper, in being the first to openly advocate equality for no other reason than its essential rightness, has altered the identity of the entire community” (Self and Community 49). While Duncan’s death is indeed shocking to the community, as is made evident in

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the epilogue dedicated to Lacey’s response to Duncan’s martyrdom, there is little indication that the characters’ sense of guilt will drive them to institute real reform. In fact, many of the characters appear more deeply entrenched in their understanding of the South as home than they had been before Duncan’s death. This is dramatically illustrated by Marcia Mae, the character who seems most likely to see Duncan’s unexpected liberation from community expectations as motivation for change: while Marcia Mae is once again determined to leave Lacey, significantly, she remains unwilling to attempt to translate her dissatisfaction with the community’s hypocrisy into any form of meaningful action. In one of the final scenes of the novel, she confronts Kerney Woolbright, reminding him of the fact that she is aware of his betrayal of Duncan and indirectly suggesting that he is complicit in Duncan’s death. Yet she reassures him, “I won’t make a big scene. Why should I tell what everybody already knows . . .?” (366). Here, Marcia Mae seems to adopt the passivity that marked Duncan before his epiphany.45 Rather ironically, then, it is Duncan who ultimately abandons the tradition of silence that circumscribes communal understanding—in defending Beck Dozer, he articulates Lacey’s unspoken truths—while those who are left in his wake, like the ostensibly bold Marcia Mae, revert to fixed patterns based on evasion and elision. Thus, The Voice at the Back Door’s conclusion is marked by a sense of collective ambivalence; with the exception of Jimmy Tallant, who appears to be ready to openly align himself with the Civil Rights movement, the rest of the characters seem intimidated rather than inspired by Duncan’s sacrifice and, just as Duncan has until the novel’s concluding chapters, they continue to cling to an outdated notion of home that they subconsciously know to be false. In its treatment of home, then, The Voice at the Back Door is not wholly unlike Spencer’s earliest Mississippi novels: it is interested in probing traditional, patriarchal notions of home even as it replicates them. Indeed, even though the novel was generally read as a challenge to southern mores, Spencer was very aware of these twin—if competing—aims: while her decision to focus on race in the novel seemingly defies Donald Davidson’s imperative to avoid a measured critique of the South, in truth she adheres closely to the values of the autochthonous ideal in her consideration of the South as home, a fact that she acknowledged in a 1972 interview: [The Voice at the Back Door] was partially motivated by my desire to straighten my own thinking out. I’d been brought up in a very traditional southern atmosphere, though many people within that

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traditional pattern were at variance with one another privately among themselves and within their most private conversations, but if an outsider came, they would probably never express these things in the sense they would privately. That’s why I was trying to do it, a book that was personal to the South. However, it wasn’t written with a desire to reform anybody—I say reform rather than reform—except myself. (Emphasis in the original; Bunting 24)

Here Spencer undercuts the novel’s seemingly clear political agenda by explaining that her rendering of the South is not “sociological,” to use Davidson’s pejorative form of the term, but, instead is derived from a perspective that is explicitly “native,” and thus contemplative rather than condemnatory. In doing so, then, Spencer suggests that the ambivalence that marks The Voice at the Back Door’s conclusion may not simply be a mode of moral censure—clearly we are invited to judge Kerney Woolbright and Marcia Mae Hunt, for example— but an expression of sympathy; the characters’ fear of change is very human in its depiction. In short, the novel’s conflicted treatment of the South in transition echoes the uncertainty that subtly marks the treatment of home in the Mississippi novels as well. There are, of course, more troubling aspects to this sympathy. While most Spencer scholars have praised the book as daringly outspoken and the novel was hailed by its liberal reviewers when it was published in 1956, some recent critics have observed that in her depiction of the racist views that shape Lacey’s political and cultural development, Spencer reveals her own indoctrination in the discursive hegemony of the white, patriarchal South. Citing Spencer’s depiction of African Americans as possessing a “savage instinct” and displaying qualities of “animal obedience,” critic Jeff Abernathy argues that “[i] n her depiction of African Americans, Spencer appears to be more informed by Thomas Dixon, Jr. than by Mark Twain, and, in addressing ‘the instinctive motion of their strange society,’ Spencer links her narrative to the very prejudices she had ostensibly set out to expose” (80). As a result, he notes that despite its “liberal” label, The Voice at the Back Door is often guided by “a primitive and essentializing ideology, a position that places Spencer much more within the culture she critiques than outside it” (80). Abernathy’s argument points to an ambivalence prevalent in mid-twentieth-century apologist literature, but it also underscores the complicated series of messages about home that Spencer navigates in addressing issues of race. As much as The Voice at the Back Door operates as a critical investigation of the racial attitudes that marked Teoc and Carrollton during Spencer’s adolescence, the

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novel also reveals the ways in which Spencer’s later training further embedded a concrete notion of traditional southern hierarchies in her understanding of southern identity, and, as significantly, of southern literature. In The Voice at the Back Door, her adherence to FugitiveAgrarian ideology is visible alongside her desire to break free from its more restrictive conventions. Thus, as much as the novel may be viewed as an attempt to escape from the rigid construction of hypermasculinity typified by the Faulknerian model, The Voice at the Back Door, like the previous Mississippi novels, cannot fully abandon traditional constructions of home. The southern home, then, exists as the central preoccupation of each of Spencer’s Mississippi novels. Even as Spencer circles, interrogates, and deconstructs that home, each novel remains tethered to a distinctly white, male vision of southern identity. Despite the ambivalence inherent in each novel—and particularly in The Voice at the Back Door—all of the Mississippi novels continue to use the values of the Old South as a cultural touchstone; while they may acknowledge the inevitable disruption of these values, the resolution of each novel speaks to a shared longing for the orthodoxy they grant. As the next chapter explores, it was only after the publication of The Voice at the Back Door, which, despite its reliance on the Fugitive-Agrarian vocabulary of home, was viewed as treasonous by both Donald Davidson and Spencer’s father, that Spencer was able to envision a new, more fluid, paradigm of home. Thus, the Mississippi novels function as a crucial marker of the ways in which Spencer was able to write within the tradition that she would later challenge, and they suggest the magnitude of her re-imagining of both the southern home and the ways it is embraced by the southern literary establishment.

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CH A P T ER

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Exploding the Can(n)on: The Light in the Piazza

Taken as a whole, Elizabeth Spencer’s Mississippi novels trace her evolving struggle to situate her work within the existing southern literary canon. While each successive novel is stamped more deeply with Spencer’s characteristic subtlety and wit, each of the novels— Fire in the Morning (1948), This Crooked Way (1952), and The Voice at the Back Door (1956)—probes familiar territory, that is staked out by Faulkner and circumscribed by the Fugitive-Agrarians. With Spencer’s next major project, The Light in the Piazza (1960), however, her work moved in an entirely new direction, rejecting many of the conventions of the Southern Renaissance novel that she had previously adopted: the work is set in Florence, Italy, instead of the Mississippi Delta; the protagonist is a middle-aged Winston-Salem housewife rather than the traditional agrarian stoic; and the central dilemma of the work is domestic—a daughter’s potential marriage— rather than epic. The transformations evident in the work’s setting, characters, and themes are also echoed in its form: Spencer took an enormous risk in writing a novella rather than a traditional novel or short story, fearing that the “freakish” length might make the manuscript unpublishable (Landscapes 318).1 There is an almost unanimous recognition within Spencer scholarship that The Light in the Piazza represents a dramatic shift within Elizabeth Spencer’s canon, and almost all critical surveys of Spencer’s work distinguish between the Mississippi novels, which are regularly treated as a distinct unit, and Spencer’s work after 1960. As the designation “Mississippi Novels” may suggest, this break is often associated with Spencer’s decision to relocate her work geographically, yet critics also see The Light in the Piazza as marking a significant shift in Spencer’s treatment of the spiritual geography of issues associated with gender and culture. For example, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw

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notes that “beginning with Margaret Johnson of The Light in the Piazza . . . Spencer has created a diverse group of female protagonists who move in a more problematic and complicated world than that of her previous fiction,” and Elsa Nettels declares that “women’s quest for freedom . . . becomes the dominant theme of Spencer’s fiction after the three Mississippi novels” (ES 67, 81). Yet, while critics agree that The Light in the Piazza is an articulation of Spencer’s “new vision,” as well as a point of departure for her later work, none has fully explored this shift nor investigated the connections between Spencer’s spatial and spiritual relocation of her characters (Prenshaw ES 66). Spencer herself tends to echo this critical omission by glossing over the radical changes that are apparent in The Light in the Piazza. In her discussions of the novella she routinely distances herself from authorial agency, claiming that “I know I wrote it , but I wasn’t so much in control of it” and asserting that the work “came close to writing itself, with little interference from the author” (Bunting 31; Landscapes 318). By characterizing the writing of The Light in the Piazza as an almost mystical experience—a sharp contrast to her descriptions of earlier novels as “deliberately plotted”—Spencer evades many of the obvious questions that arise from its seeming abandonment of the characters and themes that had marked the Mississippi novels, and, more significantly, its rejection of the Fugitive-Agrarian paradigm that had served as the basis of her previous work (Haley 15). In an interview in 1972, however, Spencer explained that while The Snare, published that year, was the first novel she had written that she felt established a pattern for her work, she saw The Light in the Piazza as the heart of an “intermediary period”: What am I really doing in a larger sense? I think I never questioned this as long as I was writing southern novels because in writing I was simply part of the southern tradition. We were in the midst of a renaissance. It was a thing of resonance and a natural activity in that time and place, and no question occurred to me until the whole first phase of my work was, I see now, over with, the three southern novels and the group of southern short stories about southern themes, which I did then. But then I began to see myself, because of having married an Englishman and living outside the South, as no longer being part of the southern locale in a strictly realistic way and having to find my place in a world that was geographically bigger than that and different than that. So I began to work out both stories and situations that would illuminate that larger world and would help me find my place in it. (Bunting 30–31)

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Spencer’s emphasis on engaging in a more global geography is telling here, not only in that she is writing from outside the South about places other than the South, but because she suggests that stepping outside of the southern literary tradition allowed her to pose questions that could not have been asked within its geographical or philosophical boundaries. The geographical model that Spencer suggests here is a useful one and offers an important tool for exploring The Light in the Piazza’s function as an “intermediary” work. Certainly, we may view Spencer’s remarks as a simple explanation for her shift in focus: in short, she became aware of a larger world and wished to explore that world in her fiction. My argument, though, is that Spencer is not merely reflecting her experience in her work—writing about Italy because she had lived in Italy—but rather using a transnational setting as a way of mapping a set of larger concerns, issues that could not be articulated through the Fugitive-Agrarian vocabulary. Thus, while the schism suggested by the labels Mississippi novels and “Italian Tales” (as The Light in the Piazza has been marketed) indicates a shift in setting, it also denotes a transgressing of the boundaries of southern identity and offers a means of critiquing the hierarchies on which that identity is based. Such a reading of Spencer’s work borrows from postcolonial theory and locational feminism, both of which are invested in notions of hybridity and translation. In her book Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998), Susan Stanford Friedman explains that locational feminism seeks to resist the kinds of binaries that mark much of feminist literary criticism (male/female, First World/Third World), and, it can be argued, form much of the basis of agrarian thought (agrarian/industrial, South/North).2 She writes that “a locational approach to feminism . . . requires a kind of geopolitical literacy built out of a recognition of how different times and places produce different and changing gender systems as these intersect with other different and changing societal stratifications and movements for social justice” (5). A global approach, Friedman suggests, complicates the conventional narratives of self/other or center/ margin that are often central to examinations of gender, race, and class by emphasizing the fluidity of the subject position. Moreover, Friedman posits that “a broadly comparative, global/locational feminism can change our analysis of ‘home’ as well as ‘elsewhere,’ helping to break the repetitive logjams of thought by casting the conditions of home in a new light and by illuminating the structures interlocking home and elsewhere” (6).

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The Light in the Piazza may seem to resist the sort of reading that Friedman proposes: while the novella positions its protagonist, Margaret Johnson, in a European setting rather than a restrictive southern community, it does not attempt to engage in true globalism as articulated by locational feminist theory, which is dependent upon the inclusion of non-Western cultures. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, in highlighting the tension between the South and “that larger world”—and, ultimately, by exploring the contested interstitial spaces created by such thinking—Spencer suggests the complex formulation of identity that is at the heart of locational feminism and the postcolonial models that inform it. Considering transnational formulations of space and place will illuminate the ways in which The Light in the Piazza puts the fixed components of southern identity—including “southernness” itself—into play. I argue here, then, that Spencer is not seeking to escape the southern hierarchical paradigm by relocating her work to Italy, but rather that she is mapping the southern experience onto a European one. By exploring the confluences and disjunctions produced by such an overlap, Spencer reveals new ways of considering the construction of southern white womanhood and traditional notions of “home,” concepts that had been largely unchallenged in her early novels.

“A History Long Past”: The South as “Another Country” By 1960, the year in which The Light in the Piazza was published, Elizabeth Spencer had spent a considerable amount of time in Europe. In 1949, she traveled through Italy, France, Switzerland, and Germany during what she has called “the magic summer” (Landscapes 213). It was her first experience outside the South and, predictably, she was both enchanted and overwhelmed. Her return to Italy in 1953 on a Guggenheim fellowship was marked by a more focused itinerary, and she divided most of the next two years between Florence and Rome. Yet, while Spencer immersed herself in Italian culture, she did not attempt to translate her experiences into her work. Rather, she felt keenly attached to the Mississippi community she was depicting in The Voice at the Back Door, a novel she had proposed while teaching at the University of Mississippi, but that became much more clearly envisioned while she was abroad. She explains, “It was very exciting to write about the South from the distance of Italy, for the outlines stood out quite clearly in my mind . . . [I]n the foreign cities all the home voices kept coming back as I wrote” (The Voice at the Back Door

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xviii). Unlike her first trip abroad, in which she was captivated by the differences that marked European and American life, her second, extended period in Italy clarified her sense of home, providing an intimate and visceral connection to the South. Spencer has, at times, characterized this seeming paradox as logical, explaining that “You can’t really know what it is to be southern unless you know what it is not to be southern. Robert Penn Warren said that you have to leave your mother’s womb before you can get to know your mother, and I found that to be true” (Broadwell and Hoag 61). Yet the binary of South/not-South and metaphor of maternal nurturing that Spencer invokes here are defied by her experiences after her return to the South in 1955 and the subsequent publication of The Voice at the Back Door. Immediately upon her return to Mississippi, she was shocked by the climate of mistrust and rage triggered by the Supreme Court’s mandate to end segregation and by the Emmett Till murder. Still considered one of the most horrific examples of southern racism and violence, the murder of fourteenyear-old Emmett Till, who was beaten to death after whistling at a white woman, had a sense of particular immediacy for Spencer as it had taken place just days before her return and only a few miles from the Spencers’ house in Carrollton. In the introduction to the 1965 edition of The Voice at the Back Door, Spencer explained that “I felt then that I might as well have spent my time in Italy chronicling a history long past, gone forever” (xx). In short, the “home voices” that had been so vivid in Italy now seemed wholly inauthentic and home itself was a place that was unrecognizable. The sense of displacement created by the changed political and social climate of the South was compounded by the personal and professional schisms that would follow in rapid succession. Elizabeth’s father, Luther, who had never been supportive of her career as a writer, engaged in a campaign of “fierce rejection” upon her return, refusing to read her manuscript of The Voice at the Back Door or even make casual inquires about Spencer’s two years in Italy (Landcsapes 287). Moreover, in the first days after Spencer’s return, they engaged in a series of bitter battles about the Emmett Till murder. Spencer, who explains in her memoir that she had always believed her father to be “forward-looking about racial matters,” was shocked when Luther Spencer “reacted to the crime the way a stone wall might if hit by a BB gun” (Landscapes 288–89). He refused to acknowledge the horror of the murder and instead relied on the rhetoric of reactionary southerners, insisting that the South’s primary concern was “maintaining order,” an empty defense of segregationist policies and racist

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behaviors (Landscapes 289). He insinuated that any other position would be construed as a betrayal of the South. While Luther Spencer made it immediately clear that he was not interested in Elizabeth’s work and was unsympathetic to her politics, he chose to underscore his dissatisfaction by withdrawing an offer of financial support. To Elizabeth’s chagrin, Luther Spencer had been providing “lavish support” to other member of the Spencer family, including her brother and nephew, while Elizabeth had had to support herself through her writing, teaching, and grants (Landscapes 287). Elizabeth was surprised (and most likely honored) when, prior to her return from Italy, her mother suggested that Luther was now ready to give Elizabeth enough money to live in New York without having to take on an additional job. After less than a week in Carrollton, however, Luther rescinded his offer, giving Spencer just two thousand dollars, enough to ensure that she could go to New York but not sufficient to provide for her there. The message was clear, Spencer suggests in her memoir; she closes the short chapter of Landscapes of the Heart ironically titled “Homecoming” with the conclusion that both she and her father had drawn: “You don’t belong down here anymore” (emphasis Spencer’s; 291). The painful split with her father was reenacted with her mentor, Donald Davidson, after the publication of The Voice at the Back Door. While Spencer acknowledges that she had always felt uncomfortable with Davidson’s notoriously conservative social and political views, she identified him specifically as a “second father,” one who supported her writing when her own father discouraged it (Landscapes 196). She explains that “he had seen my mind at work, even if going off on the wrong track, and had thought me of enough value to want to haul me back and set me down to start over again” (177). In her memoir, Spencer writes often of Davidson’s brilliance and surprising thoughtfulness, and she acknowledges that his continued interest in her work filled an important void created by her family. Davidson’s support, of course, was not limited to his encouragement. In honoring the long history of institutional loyalty that had marked the Fugitive-Agrarians’ reign at Vanderbilt, Davidson had provided Spencer with a series of contacts that were critical to publishing her early work and to establishing her within the literary community. Not only did he introduce her to Allen Tate and other Fugitive-Agrarians while she was at Vanderbilt, but later in her career he provided support in numerous ways, arranging for David Clay to serve as her editor at Dodd, Mead, after she had written Fire in the Morning, for example, and offering her smaller kindnesses such as

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hosting her at Bread Loaf in 1950. Davidson was also a careful cultivator of Spencer’s place in the Vanderbilt tradition, as evidenced by his mention of Spencer, along with Madison Jones and Walter Sullivan, in his 1957 Lamar Lecture at Mercer University.3 Moreover, Davidson had instilled in Spencer an indelible sense of the importance of the autochthonous ideal. She explains that she took Davidson’s message to heart, understanding that “If I was to write, then sticking to my heritage would be the only route possible” (Landscapes 188). Thus, the cultural legacy that her father had conveyed to Spencer while she was growing up in Carrollton and Teoc was made central to her sense of her self as a distinctly southern author by Davidson. It is somewhat ironic, then, that The Voice at the Back Door, a novel Spencer has said was rooted in “love and blessing” for the South was the cause of a rift with Davidson that was never repaired. Spencer has explained simply that “I never heard from Davidson again after the publication of my own novel on a racial subject” (Landscapes 184). Davidson’s increasingly reactionary writings would likely portend such a response to The Voice at the Back Door and thus his rejection must not have been entirely surprising to her, but the break would still have been painful. She has written very little of this split, noting only that she did nothing to try to repair the relationship, understanding that Davidson’s “strict dogmas” on racial issues would supersede his affection for her (Landscapes 180).4 Within an exceptionally brief period of time, then, Spencer’s notions of home were fundamentally disrupted. Shortly after returning from Italy, she found herself homeless in almost every sense: the South’s resolve to defend the racial traditions she rejected made her a stranger in her own land; her father’s refusal to provide her with financial support left her isolated from her family and without the resources to regroup; and Donald Davidson’s rejection of her most successful novel to date left her without a primary literary mentor. This separation from the Father(s) is, of course, imbued with psychoanalytic significance: Spencer found herself, in a sense, orphaned. At the heart of any interpretation of this expulsion from—and rejection of—her nuclear and literary families, however, is Spencer’s understanding of the South as home. After writing three novels that functioned as paeans to the values of the southern patriarchy, Spencer found that home—and the ideals that comprised it—had been evacuated of meaning. Spencer’s “disinheritance” was followed by a period of displacement: after her brief stay in Mississippi, Spencer spent the fall and winter months in New York and then once again went abroad, this

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time to London. There she met up with John Rusher, an Englishman she had dated while in Italy; within a few months, they were married. Instead of choosing to return to the South or to settle in Rusher’s native England, however, the couple compromised, moving to Montreal, Canada. The move is an interesting one for a number of reasons, but foremost among them is the fact that Canada is a country to which neither had measurable allegiance, and it stood in stark contrast to the complicated palimpsest suggested by the South or the rebuke inherent in a move to the North.5 Moreover, Montreal represented an escape from all known forms of patriarchal power, whether paternal (as in the case of Carrollton), professional (southern universities), or even matrimonial (England).6 While Spencer’s relocation to Montreal was in many ways extraordinary, the sense of dislocation she experienced upon her return to Mississippi from Italy is not particularly exceptional. Faulkner’s depiction of an alienated Quentin Compson at Harvard in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Thomas Wolfe’s characterization of an anguished George Webber in You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), among others, established the exiled southerner as an immediately recognizable trope. As early as 1962, the paradox of the repatriated southerner was ensconced in southern scholarship: in his essay “The Southern Writer and the Faraway Country,” Louis Rubin outlines an almost archetypal process of self-induced exile. Citing examples such as Faulkner, Tate, Warren, Lytle, and even Davidson (with some qualification), Rubin argues that postwar intellectuals would inevitably be compelled to physically leave the South, at least temporarily, but unlike their literary forbearers, they would be unable to rejoin the community upon return, regardless of their willingness to re-embrace southern identity. Even if a writer’s perception of the South had not changed while abroad—or, in many cases, in the North—a return to the South would highlight the slippage between the South as it exists and the imagined community that the writer had recalled. The writer would ultimately determine that “his standards were different, his attitudes toward the common southern experience were different. He may have become very ‘Southern’—but in a quite self-conscious way, as if playing a game with himself” (11). Rubin argues that the southern writer must now inhabit a fictional South, one produced in the overlap between memory—which is informed largely by a mythic South—and experience—which is marked by selfconsciousness. Rubin characterizes this South as “another country,” explaining “it is not the country in which they were born, nor

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the country to which they once fled, nor yet the South to which they came back . . . [I]t is the country of fiction” (20). Read against contemporary postcolonial theory, this essay is surprisingly fresh: Rubin’s thesis depends upon the rejection of traditional binaries (North/South), suggesting instead that in experiencing both of these places, writers are aware of the fact that the boundaries they once found so meaningful are diminished, eclipsed by the “fictional” space created by their overlap. Ultimately, though, Rubin’s vision of a “faraway country” is too insular, neglecting to account fully for the experience of exile. In Rubin’s heuristic, the writer’s contact with an Other affects only his or her understanding of the South, but has no effect on the South itself; it remains isolated and intact. If instead we argue, as Jon Smith and Debra Cohn do in their introduction to Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004), that “ ‘south’— not to mention ‘American’—is a relative term whose meaning is contingent on a geopolitical context fraught with power imbalance both inter- and intranationally,” then this the space of overlap grows both richer and more complex. Rather than a mythic faraway country, we are given what Homi Bhabha has termed the Third Space: a site of cultural intersection in which “the meaning of symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; . . . even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew” (37). Bhabha, of course, writes about the juncture of imperial and colonial cultures, but in the context of new world studies, his term is increasingly useful in describing more ambiguous political and social relationships, and Spencer, who found herself in the overlap created by southern identity and her discovery of a world that was “bigger than that and different than that,” certainly was exposed to the sort of tensions and terrors of cultural collision that Bhabha explores. Thus, we may argue that Spencer’s geographical displacement allowed for an artistic refashioning as well: The Light in the Piazza is able both to circumvent the rigidity suggested by Davidson’s autochthonous ideal and to avoid the sort of narcissism implied in Rubin’s faraway country. Freed from these constraints, the novella does not view notions of place— and its attendant vision of home—in conventionally southern ways, but rather employs the space of Italy as a way of “reading anew” the assumptions inherent in “a southern sense of place.”

“Face to Face with Italy”: Redefining Home On first reading, The Light in the Piazza may seem engaged in a Jamesian notion of culture clash rather than Bhabhain cultural overlap,

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and indeed, a version of the conventional marriage plot (albeit slightly skewed) is at the novella’s heart: The Light in the Piazza tells the story of Margaret Johnson and her beautiful daughter, Clara, who have traveled to Florence together.7 What is meant to be a European holiday—the sort of trip that is de rigueur for an upper-middle-class housewife and her child—becomes complicated when Clara, who has been injured and has the mental capacity of a child, falls in love with a young Italian man, Fabrizio, who does not recognize her disability because of the language barrier. Margaret, who had never imagined an independent life for her daughter, finds herself held captive by the possibility of Clara’s marriage and subsequent inclusion into the highly protective patriarchal Italian culture. Knowing that her husband would disapprove of the marriage, she secretly negotiates with Fabrizio’s father, Signor Naccarelli, and, despite several seemingly insurmountable obstacles, brings about the wedding. The novella is, above all else, a captivating story, fascinating in the way it blurs ostensibly clear borders: Clara, who appears to be a beautiful woman, actually possesses the intellect of a child; Margaret, who seems a typically passive, if extraordinarily thoughtful, southern housewife, unexpectedly adopts “the role that traditionally would have been played by her businessman husband,” as Peggy Prenshaw has argued, “devis[ing] a shrewd strategy and tak[ing] bold action” (ES 71–72); and a marriage contract that would seem dishonest at best (and certainly immoral by many) is deemed “the right thing” to do (Light in the Piazza 65). That once strict borders—between childhood and maturity, between female submissiveness and male authority, and between that which is ethical and that which is iniquitous—become fluid is attributed in the novella to Italy: it is suggested that the distinctly Florentine light that floods the city causes those bathed in it to see the world through a romantic haze. Finding oneself immured in this delightful miasma is to “come face to face with Italy,” as the narrative voice explains (12). Yet, as this implicitly confrontational image suggests, Italy does not promise easy transformation. Instead, in rendering once-strict boundaries porous, the space of Italy provides its occupants with a shifting and uncertain ground. It is fascinating, then, to watch Margaret grapple with a series of overlapping, and at times uncomfortable, identities, even as she often denies their existence. As the novella opens, Margaret is firmly entrenched in a fixed subject position: she aligns herself with an acutely American construction of identity rooted in the traditional domestic values of the 1950s. In one of the most telling lines of the novella, the limited omniscient narrative voice informs the reader that “She

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showed what she was: the busy American housewife, mother, hostess, cook, and civic leader who paid attention to her looks” (10). The confidence derived from this identity is underscored by the narrative voice’s tendency to refer to her as “Mrs. Johnson” rather than “Margaret”; such an identification, which locates her within the boundaries of her marriage and community, confers an unmistakable sense of authority. Moreover, she sees her American-ness as imbuing her with a sense of moral certitude—“She believed, as most-Anglo-Saxons do, that she always acted logically and to the best of her ability on whatever she knew to be true”—and she insouciantly ascribes much of her strength to an “American instinct for getting on with it, no matter what it was” (12, 21). The subject position that Margaret has adopted is distinctly American, rather than uniquely southern. In this context, she stands in contrast to the women in Spencer’s Mississippi novels, almost all of whom see themselves as conforming to a particularly regional construction of identity. Thus, Margaret’s overlay of an American identity on her southern conception of identity is initially surprising, but it is justified by two plot-driven realities: first, and most obvious, is the fact that because she is in Italy, Margaret is seen—and now sees herself—as an American; in an international arena, the notion of “southerner” is not particularly meaningful. The Italians do not know enough about the South to use her regional identity to define and limit her; as a result, she is free to expand her own behavior and conception of self to overflow the banks of southern identity and to spill into the broader construction of “American” identity. The second possible explanation for this refashioning is more complicated, and is rooted in the Johnsons’ rationale for their trip to Italy. Margaret and Clara have come abroad because, in a burst of enthusiasm fueled by an emerging sexuality, Clara has embraced a grocery boy. Margaret and her husband, Noel, are confounded by the inappropriate gesture, and, ultimately, it “had really decided them on another trip abroad” (11). The decision is in some ways illogical: surely, the relocation to Italy will not quell Clara’s sexual impulses. The trip abroad will, however, remove Clara from the community’s view. The vacation, then, is designed as a temporary escape from the South, where Clara stands in uncomfortable contrast to the expectations of southern womanhood, and Margaret’s re-envisioning of herself as an American, rather than a southerner, provides a means of further escape from these norms.8 Margaret also finds that her “new” identity as an American invests her with an unexpected power. In substituting the oppositional construct of American/Italian for the collection of binaries that shape

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traditional notions of southern identity (and that ensure white male privilege), Margaret escapes a system in which she is marginalized and instead adopts a subject position in which she is dominant to an Italian Other. This reversal is, in many ways, not terribly surprising: as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin explain, modern travel often exaggerates the false binaries of Imperial Self/Exotic Other. They note that the experience of foreign travel is “typically stereotyped, packaged, and reduced to an easily consumable product. In effect, the tourist, ostensibly in search of the new, is actually seeking the already known” (98). This commoditization of culture works in two ways: it reinforces stereotypes of the Other, in this case Italians, but, as importantly, it also bolsters notions of Self. In this model, the tourist’s notion of Self becomes more entrenched through encounters with the Other; the stereotypes implicit in each identity protect the tourist from any threat that might be posed by the exotic, and thus the tourist’s conception of home and “elsewhere” are reinforced. This model is clearly seen in Margaret’s adoption of The Piazza della Signoria as a “home base” in Florence. The Piazza is one of the city’s most famous squares, and Clara and Margaret often retreat there after long days of sightseeing. Margaret ascribes an almost mystically recuperative power to the Piazza, and she relishes its famous sculpture and architecture, enjoys its Italian aperitifs, and basks in its indescribably romantic sunlight. Yet, despite the seemingly discrete Italian nature of the Piazza, Margaret acknowledges that “[t]he Florentines seemed to favor other gathering spaces at this hour” (3). Moreover, many of the famous sculptures—including the David—that line the Piazza are not the original works, which have been moved into museums, but reproductions. Thus, this presumably archetypal Italian space is occupied by tourists rather than Italians and replicas rather than Renaissance artwork; as a result, the Piazza offers a particularly benign version of the Italian Other, allowing its occupants to glimpse the signs of the exotic without experiencing a sense of alterity themselves. The imperial perspective Margaret adopts in the Piazza is further attenuated by her reliance upon interpreters. In the early portions of their trip, neither she nor Clara speaks Italian, relying instead on Florentines who will speak to them in English or, as frequently, on Margaret’s ubiquitous guidebooks. The books serve a practical function, identifying important sites to visit and providing relevant histories, but inevitably they also “translate” experience, functioning as a lens through which Italy can be evaluated and interpreted. This does not mean that Margaret is oblivious to the world that

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surrounds her: that level of cultural blindness is comically typified by a German couple visiting the Piazza, who “all but harnessed in fine camera equipment, sat at the foot of Celini’s triumphant Perseus, slumped and staring at nothing” (4). However, because Margaret is not engaged in the work of translation, but rather is a passive recipient of meaning, she remains inscribed in her original subject position and her insight into the Florentines she encounters is restricted to her own lived experience. Margaret’s confidence is not merely invested in her guidebooks, but rather extends to the ways in which they allow her to “read” the Italian environment. When Clara asks her mother about the history of the Piazza, Margaret points to the historical marker that recalls the burning of Savonarola, the fifteenth-century monk who inspired Florentines to burn their luxury goods in what is now known as The Bonfire of the Vanities, and then, years later, was burned at the stake at the same spot after he fell from favor. In explaining the site’s significance to Clara, Margaret attempts to diminish the event’s inherent violence, explaining, “He was a preacher who told them they were very wicked and they didn’t like him for it . . . They must feel very sorry about it now, because they put a marker down to his memory” (4). Margaret’s oversimplification is designed to help Clara understand without alarming her, but her glossing of the event also demonstrates that complicated narratives such as Savonarola’s are often buried, in this case quite literally: while Michelangelo’s David and Cellini’s sculpture of Perseus holding Medusa’s head aloft serve as focal points for visitors to the Piazza, the porphyry plaque dedicated to Savonarola’s death is set into the ground. Savonarola’s history is marked by ambiguity—he was alternately embraced and vilified by the Florentines—and thus his story is obscured in contrast to the narratives of heroic conquest, which make up most of the Piazza. This privileging of the dominant narrative is significant, especially in a space like the Piazza della Signoria that is alternately “possessed” by Florentines and tourists like the Johnsons, and Margaret’s unquestioning acceptance of the marginalization of Savonarola’s story seems to reflect her confidence that her own experience is encompassed in prevailing narratives. It is in the Piazza della Signoria that Fabrizio and Clara first meet, and Margaret’s easy indifference toward Fabrizio is indicative of the ways in which an imperial identity is reified by space of the Piazza. She is annoyed when Fabrizio first approaches Clara in part because she believes the exchange will follow a predictable trajectory: once they have engaged in conversation long enough for Clara’s disability to become

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apparent, Margaret will have to intervene. Yet Margaret’s dismissiveness is also rooted in the fact that she believes that Fabrizio is trying to sell them something; when he gives her his business card to demonstrate that he owns a small store, she sees the move as “inevitable” and notes wryly, “They were shoppers, after all, or would be” (5). Despite the exasperation that she expresses, however, Margaret is quite comfortable with such a characterization of her position. Inherent in her role as a “cultural consumer” is the assumption that she will become a traditional consumer, employing shopping as a form of economic conquest. When, later in the trip, Margaret runs into two women from Winston-Salem, her friends don’t share details of what they’ve seen in Italy but rather what they’ve bought: “Wasn’t it wonderful what you could buy here? Linens! Leather-lined bags! So cheap!” (28). The moment is a comic one, a wince-inducing glimpse of “ugly Americanism” revealing that the women see themselves as asserting cultural superiority through their buying power. It is not surprising, then, that when Fabrizio approaches Margaret and Clara, Margaret immediately sees him as an unworthy adversary, a shopkeeper that she can choose to engage or not, depending upon her humor. And, somewhat predictably, Margaret conflates his role as a shopkeeper and his identity as an Italian, thus reassuring herself of her own identity as economically (and, by extension, culturally) advantaged. Her dismissiveness is evidenced in the mockery implicit in her identification of him as “an Italian out principally to sell everything for ‘the gentlemans’ ” (6). Fabrizio is not easily put off by Margaret, however, and after repeatedly arranging for “accidental” encounters with the Johnsons, he enlists his father, Signor Naccarelli, to help further his cause. Signor Naccarelli’s English is much better than Fabrizio’s, and he rapidly is able to put Margaret at ease by asking her about her life in Winston-Salem and making reference to his fondness for the Americans stationed in Florence during the War. Margaret’s sense of security is further buttressed when she accompanies Signor Naccarelli to the parade staged in the Piazza for the festival of San Giovanni. While ostensibly a tribute to the city’s history, the parade is scheduled “by coincidence during the tourist season,” and thus Italian identity is performed as much as it is celebrated (14). The parade follows the traditional edict that “titled gentlemen should wedge themselves into the family suit of armor, mount a horse, and ride in procession, preceded by lesser men in striped knee britches beating drums” (14). Once again, then, the Piazza della Signoria becomes a safe space where hierarchies—even if artificial—are enforced and identity, as construed within a strictly constructed paradigm, remains unchallenged.

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As the possibility of Clara and Fabrizio’s marriage becomes more real, however, Margaret must leave the protected space of the Piazza and engage in a more authentic form of cultural exchange. This is first illustrated in the tea that the Naccarellis host at their home: the whole family is present to welcome Margaret and Clara, and Signor Naccarelli, in his role as host, makes the kind of earnest small talk that marks the first meeting of the families of any young couple. Yet Margaret is also being exposed to the real world of the Other. For example, after expressing polite interest in one of the Naccarellis’ paintings, Signor Naccarelli informs Margaret that it was painted by the artist Ghirandaio, but he is “not the famous one in the guidebooks” (18). Clearly, Margaret has ventured outside the realm of her guidebooks, and she must translate experience for herself. Moreover, Margaret’s identity as an American does not seem to grant her implicit power within the Naccarelli home as it did in the Piazza della Signoria. While Signor Naccarelli never adjusts his easygoing tone, the stories he tells in his own home suggest a harder attitude. For example, “Some little mention was made of the family villa in a nearby paese, blown up unfortunately by the Allies during the war—the Americans, in fact—but it was indeed a necessary military objective and these things happen in all wars. Pazienza” (18). This more mixed evaluation of America’s role contrasts with the unqualified “fondness” for American troops that Signor Naccarelli expressed in the artificial environment of the Piazza. Similarly, his call for “patience” does not seem to be directed at anyone in particular, but suggests an unarticulated frustration with American policy and intimates that Margaret, like all Americans, may not understand the implications of American action. The most significant interaction at the Naccarelli home is one that Margaret barely registers, however. The meeting has been arranged so that Signora Naccarelli, Fabrizio’s mother, may meet Clara and Margaret. In many ways, it is Signora Naccarelli who should serve as Margaret’s counterpart. In an earlier conversation with Signor Naccarelli, Margaret had identified “her responsibilities” in WinstonSalem as “her house, her husband, and family” and these priorities squarely align with Signora Naccarelli’s (18). In coming to the Naccarelli apartment, then, Margaret is entering the domestic sphere that Signora Naccarelli controls, one whose construction she should presumably recognize. Indeed, Signora Naccarelli appears to identify with Margaret almost immediately, and she seems eager to communicate and bond with her. When Clara gazes serenely at a portrait of the Madonna and child, Signora Naccarelli, whose inability to

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speak English has rendered her mute for most of the Johnsons’ visit, moves closer to Margaret and says, speaking deliberately, “Mio Fliglio è buono. Capisce?” (19). Signora Naccarelli carefully selects language that Margaret can easily understand so that she will not have to rely on her husband as a translator; in her simple insistence that her son is a good boy, she communicates a desire both to speak directly to Margaret and to convey shared values. Yet to Margaret, Signora Naccarelli seems an almost absurdly uncomplicated figure. Whereas Signora Naccarelli reads purity in Clara’s rapt attention to the portrait of the Madonna, Margaret sees a blossoming sexuality: she credits Clara’s gaze to the fact that “she had gotten it into her head recently that Fabrizio and babies were somehow connected” (19). Her reply to Signora Naccarelli’s repeated proclamations of her son’s goodness is a simple, “Si. Capisco,” a polite response that does not acknowledge Signora Naccarelli’s desire to identify their shared goals as mothers (19). Indeed, Margaret does not seem to recognize any connection to Signora Naccarelli at all: cloaked in black, mourning a relative of such little consequence that Signor Naccarelli dismisses the death as “no matter,” and insisting on her son’s goodness, Signora Naccarelli seems a woman whose adherence to traditional values make her slightly pathetic and undoubtedly irrelevant in the marriage negotiations (14). Signora Naccarelli’s silence within the space of her home—and her seeming insignificance outside of it—echoes one of Margaret’s few references to her life in Winston-Salem. She recalls that a few years ago, when her husband Noel was on an extended business trip, she tried to mainstream Clara by enrolling her in a “normal” school. Clara, of course, could not function at the level of the other students, and Margaret’s “experiment” ended in failure, but, interestingly, she was not held accountable. Upon discovering Margaret’s deception, the principal reserved judgment, remarking, “I understand that your husband is away” (34). While Margaret is charged with the care of her house, her husband, and family, her husband is still recognized as the authority figure, and in important ways she is still subject to him. After Noel returns and Margaret confesses to him, she is sent on a month-long retreat to Bermuda. Her behavior is seen as an indication of a mental breakdown, and she does not return home until she recognizes that her desires were “insane” (35). Thus, Signora Naccarelli serves as a reflection of Margaret’s southern self: just as Signora Naccarelli allows her husband to speak for her within her own home, Noel is the authority in the Johnsons’ home, and just as Signora Naccarelli is not taken seriously by Margaret when she

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attempts to articulate any type of agency, Margaret is dismissed when she steps outside of traditional boundaries. Margaret’s inability to see such connections demonstrates that her sense of identity has been informed primarily by exclusion. Her assumption of a coherent American Self is rooted in her denial of her identity as a southern, upper-middle-class, white woman and all of the complexities inherent in such a position. Self-identification as an American has erased the problem of Clara’s emerging sexuality: Clara’s inappropriate embrace of the grocery boy in Winston-Salem was catastrophic, but in Italy her interest in Fabrizio is acceptable. Furthermore, her relocation has expunged Margaret’s lack of agency: whereas she defers to Noel in Winston-Salem, as an American in Italy, she holds an unquestioned authority. Thus, Margaret’s investment in a distinctly American identity, one that rests on the binary of American Self/Italian Other, functions to elide constructions of identity based on gender, class, and regional identity, as well as other, less visible, categories of identity. Yet, the space of the Naccarellis’ apartment reveals that an exaggerated American identity cannot sustain power when it comes into contact with the reality—rather than a caricature—of the Other, and thus the Naccarellis’ home functions as a crucial Third Space. Unlike the artificiality of the Piazza, which affirms a monolithic construction of identity, the Naccarelli apartment reveals previously unimagined confluences and shifting relationships between Margaret and the Naccarellis. The binary of American Self/Italian Other, which implies an Imperial/Marginalized positionality, is disrupted by the ways in which gender and region complicate notions of Self and Other. Put simply, the fact that Signor Naccarelli contests the American occupation of Florence challenges Margaret’s conflation of American and “Unquestioned Imperial Power.” Similarly, Signora Naccarelli’s submission to her husband defies Margaret’s understanding of her own, seemingly ungendered, position as an American and instead recalls her investment in the binaries that circumscribe southern identity. In their essay “What’s Home Got to Do With It?” (1997), Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty explain that “stable notions of self and identity”—those rooted in stereotyped binary oppositions—“are based on exclusion and terror” (297). In short, a seemingly “stable” identity is based on what the Self is not, and that Other becomes terrifying through its ability to suggest the fragility of the Self. In her visit to the Naccarelli apartment, Margaret does not become aware of her reliance on exclusion; however, after she leaves, the ambivalence inherent in her adopted American subject position is revealed

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in the fear and uncertainty that she experiences. This anxiety is first articulated in her evolving relationship with Clara. After their visit to the Naccarellis, Margaret finds Clara’s behavior increasingly incomprehensible. Away from Fabrizio, Clara becomes stubborn, engaging in performative acts of childish rebellion such as sticking out her tongue and ignoring her mother’s calls. Margaret is distressed by this behavior: She had never known Clara to show a mean or stubborn side. Yet the minute the girl fell beneath the eye of Fabrizio, her rapt, transported Madonna look came over her, and she sat still and gentle, docile as a saint, beautiful as an angel. Mrs. Johnson had never beheld such hypocrisy. She had let things go too far, she realized, and whereas before she had been worried, now she was becoming afraid. (20)

Margaret’s “fear” is unexplored, and the reader is lead to believe that Margaret is alarmed solely by the unwelcome onset of her daughter’s misbehavior. In fact, however, the “hypocrisy” that Margaret observes in Clara is a reflection of the same dualism that Margaret is experiencing. Clara is, on one hand, replicating the submissive posturing appropriate to a wife, and, on the other, engaging in rebellious acts that demonstrate her power. Margaret herself is torn between those forms—the southern wife and the American woman—and thus her concern about Clara’s behavior is, then, also a reflection of the ways in which her own identity is destabilized. Significantly, Margaret decides to address her fear by seeking advice from the American consulate, a literal and figurative ambassador of the values of home. But the consulate is no longer a reassuring space for Margaret. While the consul seems to be a perfect stereotype of American authority—he possesses “one of those perpetually young American faces topped by a crew cut” and wears a seersucker jacket—he shows no interest in her dilemma (20). Worse yet, his youth and obvious boredom—he “[twists] a rubber band repeatedly around his wrist”—speak to impotence rather than authority (21). Even the space itself, although conspicuously coded as American, does not display power; the consul has placed a “standard American office desk in a richly paneled room cut to the noble proportions of the Florentine Renaissance,” and the result hints at a slightly foolish, rather than authoritative, attempt at imposing American identity on an Italian space (20). Thus, Margaret is dissatisfied by her trip to the consulate, and her observations suggest that the American consul may not just be unwilling to help her, but that he is unable to. The space inscribed as distinctly American is

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evacuated of any real power, further challenging her subject position and suggesting that it may be impossible for her to return to or find comfort in “the old ways.” The disorientation that is created by her contact with the Other in the Naccarelli home and compels her to seek reinforcement in the American consulate is magnified in Margaret’s experience with a rude carrozza driver. She has hailed the driver to take her to a minister, whom she hopes will prove a better sounding board than the consul. The ride between the consulate and the church is not a simple one, however: the carrozza driver takes off at full speed, and both his seeming lack of control and the foreignness of their route threaten Margaret. She is, admittedly, heading to “an obscure address,” but the section of Florence that the carrozza races through seems unrelated to the places she previously has visited (21). Unlike the wide spaces of the Piazza della Signoria, the “narrow, echoing streets [are] gathered in” and, when the carrozza crosses the river, these enclosed spaces become labyrinthine: they enter “a small piazza from which a half-dozen little streets branched out” (22). For the first time during her trip to Florence, Margaret is outside of the space that has been “stereotyped, packaged, and reduced to an easily consumable product” and, moreover, she has relinquished her power to navigate this space to the driver; she is immersed in the world defined by the Other. When the reckless carrozza driver almost crashes, Margaret demands that he stop the carriage even though they are not yet at the church. Frightened and angry, she contemplates walking away without paying him, but ultimately reconsiders, “mindful . . . of a certain American responsibility” (23). Yet, as she is about to give five hundred lire to the driver, whom she identifies as “the object of her charity,” he loudly demands that she pay him two thousand lire (23). As residents of the neighborhood silently look on, Margaret realizes that her role is not one of a “benefactor” but that of a helpless victim: The shocking thing—the thing that was paralyzing her, making her hand close on the wallet as though it contained something infinitely more precious than that twenty or thirty dollars in lire—was the overturn of all of her values. He was not ashamed to be seen extorting an unjust sum from a lone woman, a stranger, obviously a lady; he was priding himself rather on showing off how ugly about it he could get. And the others, the onlookers, those average people so depended upon by an American to adhere to what is good? She did not deceive herself. No one was coming to her aid. Nobody was going to think, It isn’t fair. (23)

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Margaret recognizes this moment as marked by “overturn”: her conception of that which is “already known” is dramatically inverted, and, as a result, there is an evident slippage between her perceived subject position and the more complex positionality she actually inhabits. In the artificial environment of the Piazza della Signoria and the streets that line it, Margaret’s imperial power is unquestioned: when she first meets Fabrizio, she thinks of him as a salesman and reverses and views her potential purchase as a form of economic conquest. When confronted by the reality of the carrozza driver in an environment that is the domain of the Other, however, Margaret’s money is offered as a form of submission. In this unmapped physical and psychic territory, she is first able to recognize the false binary that she has inhabited and to sense its overlap with other categories of identity. In turning to the onlookers, “those average people so depended upon by an American to do what is good,” Margaret realizes that the construction of an American identity is reliant upon the consensus of the Other. Without the bystanders’ recognition of Margaret’s status, American identity is evacuated of meaning. Furthermore, in her desperation, Margaret refers to herself as “a lone woman, a stranger, obviously a lady.” Sensing the artificiality of her American subject position, she complicates her understanding of that identity, incorporating the issues of gender and class that she has previously denied, and, significantly, indicating her own status as a marginalized figure: she is a “stranger” in a foreign land, an Other. After she gives the carrozza driver the two thousand lire he has demanded, Margaret “fold[s] her purse closely beneath her arm in a ridiculous parody of everything Europeans said about Americans” (23). Here, Margaret is cognizant that she is mimicking American mannerisms rather than engaging in authentic behavior. This mimicry, according to postcolonial theorists, is a signifier of the anxiety inherent in the overlap of cultural identities. In essence, Margaret recognizes that she is not represented by the subject position of the American, and her imitation of its values and gestures speaks to this dislocation. While her mimicry represents an attempt to articulate the standards of the imperial position, these utterance are always, as Homi Bhabha has explained, “almost the same, but not quite” (89). Margaret may adopt the gaze of the American, but she does “not quite” possess the power of that subject position. Thus, Margaret now sees herself as possessing attributes of both imperial and marginalized identity, and she has articulated an awareness of the ways in which her status as a southern woman—“a lady”— further complicates this position. After her misadventure with the

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carrozza driver, she finds that she is unable to reveal the true nature of her dilemma to the minister she has sought out, and when she emerges from the church, she is lost, both literally and spiritually: She did not any longer seem to possess her brains, but to stand apart from them as from everything else in Italy. She had got past the guidebooks and still she was standing and looking. And her own mind was only one of the things she was looking at, and what was going on inside it was like the ringing of so many bells. (26)

The cacophony Margaret hears is an aural reflection of her confusion, and the overlapping chimes suggest the complicated cartography that exists beyond the simplified perspective advocated by her guidebooks. Margaret’s disorientation reaches a climax when she returns to her hotel. There, she encounters two women from Winston-Salem, “a chatty plumpish pair whose husbands had presented them with a summer abroad” (28). The women should function as Margaret’s double, but in fact they represent an identity that she has abandoned. Their discussions of shopping in Florence and of Winston-Salem’s latest gossip strike Margaret as hollow and foreign. Yet, Margaret is made equally uneasy after she is able to escape the women and to return to her hotel room, where a box of flowers is delivered from the Naccarellis. The lilies seem intimidating to her; she reads them both as a demand that she make a formal decision about the marriage, and, less directly, as a reminder of Italian difference. The flowers seem to Margaret to be “blatantly phallic,” and thus function as a challenge to her southern modesty (29). Caught between two exaggerated identities, neither of which seems to offer a place for her, Margaret decides to flee. Instead of heading home, however, Margaret chooses to go to Rome; in doing so, she reveals that there is no safe space, no place that offers the easy answers inherent in fixed identity. Margaret and Clara’s retreat to Rome is brief, however. Margaret is swayed by Clara’s very adult grief over her separation from Fabrizio, and she returns to Florence determined to bring about their marriage. It is only after she and Signor Naccarelli have agreed that the wedding will take place, though, that Margaret attempts to reconcile her decision with the values of home by speaking with her husband. As Margaret has predicted, Noel argues that marriage is not appropriate for Clara, but he seems as concerned that the Naccarellis are “just after her money” as he does about the ethical implications of her marriage (42). Given the enormity of the decision that is facing them,

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Margaret and Noel’s conversation is very brief; however, Margaret spends most of the next day imagining Noel’s thoughts after he has gotten off the phone, and she uses this imagined articulation of the values of home as the basis for her own rebuttal. At the root of these values lies Noel’s seeming fixation with money. He works for a large cigarette company, promoting a product that Signor Naccarelli notes is “a very American thing” (38). Ironically, Noel is unable to join Margaret and Clara in Florence because one of the company’s spokesmen has been called up before the Un-American Activities Committee. Thus, Noel suggests that he is not merely earning a living by remaining in Winston-Salem; he is, in effect, fighting charges of Communism and affirming American values. And, in fact, Margaret believes that Noel will object to Clara’s marriage not because of the harm that may come to his daughter, but because his own values do not seem to be reflected by Italians: she suspects that he would be appalled by “the inefficient way of life” in Florence, including the afternoon siesta, “when every shop, including his prospective son-inlaw’s, shut up at the very hour when they could be making the most money” (44). Margaret believes, however, that in some ways Noel’s absolute faith in the power of money reflects a desire for normalcy. She credits Clara’s accident and “the nature of the times,” including the war, as steering Noel toward a belief that money would function as “the very walls that kept out the storm” (49). For Noel, money simplifies and strengthens identity. In Margaret’s recent experience, however, the boundaries delineated by money have been exposed as artificial. The consul, whom Margaret bitterly notes is able to “live in a palace” at the expense of American taxpayers, is unable to help her, and the Italian carrozza driver, whom Margaret assumes is an object of charity, in fact wields an unexpected—if brutal—power (21). Yet, even if Margaret has grown to question Noel’s conflation of economic security with a fixed, unassailable identity, she continues to see money as granting her an often uncomfortable power. When she and Signor Naccarelli meet to discuss Clara and Fabrizio’s future, she explains that Noel will make a gift of five thousand dollars to the couple, and later, when the wedding has been called off because of confusion over Clara’s age, Margaret increases the sum to fifteen thousand dollars. She is certain that Noel will not understand and that he will believe that she has “bought” Clara’s marriage. While Margaret is dismissive of this view when she imagines the case she might lay out before Noel, contending Noel’s charge is another example of his literalist thinking, in her less certain moments she is also uncomfortable with

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“the dull moment of exchange” that has brought about Clara’s marriage (63). In many ways, Margaret’s ambivalence is misleading. Some critics have contended that Margaret has, in essence, sold her daughter, and the ethical implications of this act trouble her at novella’s ending.9 However, I contend that Margaret is not as worried about selling her daughter—as she herself points out, a dowry is “customary” in Europe (as might a lavish wedding be in the United States)—rather, she is uncertain about what her investment buys for both Clara and herself (48). Certainly, the cost is great: as Margaret explains to Noel, she does not wish to lose Clara, and when the wedding takes place, she solemnly notes that it marks the beginning of actively “missing [Clara] forever” (42, 65). Yet Margaret sees this sacrifice, along with her financial “gift,” as the only way to allow Clara—and, to some extent, herself—to reshape the rigid expectations that circumscribe life in Winston-Salem. For Clara, of course, this shift will be physical as well as metaphorical: she will live in Florence and take on the roles and responsibilities of a young Italian wife. Many critics have noted that there is an irony in such a position in that it is not unlike the restrictive role occupied by Margaret in the South, but such a reading of the novella denies the ways in which Clara is actually liberated from the boundaries of home. Not only is she in control of her sexuality, an aspect of her identity denied to her at home, but Clara also is able to forge a hybrid identity for herself, one unimaginable in Winston-Salem. Unlike Margaret, who is often disoriented by her inability to locate herself within a fixed identity, Clara has thrived in the uninscribed space suggested by Italy. For example, as Clara spends time in Florence, her ability to understand the language grows and Margaret notes that “her Italian was sounding more clearly every day” (20). This fluency is also reflected in her fluidity; Margaret observes that Clara seems able to fit into Italian culture. In one incident when they are separated, Margaret sees Clara from afar and almost mistakes her for an Italian: “Stepping along now in her hand-woven Italian skirt and sleeveless cotton blouse, with leather sandals, smart straw bag, dark glasses and the glint of earrings against her cheek, she would fool any tourist into thinking her a native” (27). Margaret is displeased— “disgusted” even—when she first sees Clara looking radiant in the Italian garb; she believes that the sense of belonging that Clara conveys is somehow deceptive, and she is made uncomfortable by it (27). Margaret ultimately comes to the conclusion, however, that Clara’s transformation is not merely superficial; instead, as she explains to

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Noel, “Clara is able to pass every day here, as she does at home, doing simple things that please her. But the difference is that here, instead of always being alone or with the family, she has all of Florence for company” (41). Margaret is suggesting not only that Clara can pass time happily, but also that she can pass as an Italian, easily crossing the borders implied by national identity and erasing, in part, the difference created by her disability. Margaret’s observation may be reread, then, as “Clara is able to pass here every day, as she is not able to at home.” To Margaret’s surprise, and ultimately her delight, Clara is at home in Italy. Just as home has become a radically altered notion for Clara, the idea of home is wholly uncertain for Margaret. As she contemplates Noel’s reaction to her decision to allow Clara and Fabrizio’s marriage to occur, Margaret finds herself once again walking outside of the area bounded by the Piazza della Signoria. Her aimless meandering parallels Noel’s imagined pacing. As she walks along unknown streets, she pictures Noel wandering around their house, going from room to room as he thinks about “the problem” of Clara’s marriage. In this imagined scenario, Noel finds solace in domestic spaces; Margaret, on the other hand, wanders farther from the area of town that is known to her, and she ultimately finds herself in “a small, poor bar” in “a remote corner of the city” (50). Unlike her earlier forays into authentic Florence, this one provides great comfort to Margaret: the two young men who are tending the bar lavish attention on her, finding joy in the solace their coffee seems to be providing to her. In this unexpected space, Margaret relaxes and finds herself able to think: What is it, to reach a decision? It is like walking down a long Florentine street where, at the very end, a dim shape is waiting until you get there. When Mrs. Johnson finally reached this street and saw what was ahead, she moved steadily forward to see it at long last up close. What was it? Well, nothing monstrous, it seemed, but human, with a face like her own, that of a woman who loved her daughter and longed for happiness. (50)

Here, momentarily at least, the Third Space is devoid of terror for Margaret. The juncture of foreign—the neighborhood, the baristas—and familiar—the coffee, the men’s quiet kindness—provides Margaret with a space in which she can appraise her situation. And, significantly, she is best able to consider her choices through the metaphor suggested by the cartography of Florence rather than the space of Winston-Salem. While she seems surprised to recognize herself

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here—she sees not a true reflection but “ a face like her own”—Margaret is reassured to find that the identification of one’s self apart from the values of the southern homeplace is “nothing monstrous,” and, in fact, comfortable. In abandoning the image of Winston-Salem as a means of providing clarity for herself, Margaret is not rejecting home in it broadest sense, but rather is revealing conventional southern values to be inadequate. We see this echoed later in the narrative: in one of her more candid moments, Margaret suggests that the easy answers provided by southern codes do not account for the complexities of human experience. She knows from her first, failed attempt to mainstream Clara that Noel will not approve of Clara’s marriage, but she suspects that his paternal sensibility has been shaped by an aversion to the abstraction Clara represents. Margaret wonders: Hadn’t he in some mysterious way already, at what point she did not know, separated his own life from that of his daughter’s? A defective thing must go. She had seen him act upon this principal too many times not to feel that in some fundamental, unconscious way he would, long ago, have broken this link. Why had he done so? Why, indeed? Why are we all and what are we doing? (64)

Margaret’s existential doubt points to the fact that even the rigidly defined notion of family and home that informs Noel’s identity offers little meaning for her. Yet, as she tosses out a stream of unanswerable questions—“Why are we all?”—she finds herself growing calmer rather than more frenzied. Although she claims she is “weary of complexities,” she is also fascinated by the possibilities inherent in these questions, and she looks forward to returning to Winston-Salem to making an effort to redefine her life and her relationship with Noel (64). She is certain that “He would grow quiet at last, and in the quiet, even Margaret Johnson had not yet dared to imagine what sort of life, what degree of delight in it, they might be able to discover (rediscover?) together” (65–66). Margaret’s inevitable return to the South captured readers’ imaginations too: Spencer reports that she received letters insisting, “Margaret Johnson has got to return to North Carolina and justify what she has done to the people there! This is the real story!” (Bunting 29). The complaint is an interesting one, for it suggests that once Margaret Johnson is again on “native ground” that she will be compelled by a moral code inherent to the South—in short, that place confers identity. I would argue, however, that Margaret

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has not merely been “blinded” by Italy, as she herself suggests, but that through her brief immersion in Italy, she has become aware of a much larger nexus of identity (28). As a result, we see her decision to encourage Clara and Fabrizio’s wedding not merely as the fulfillment of a southern mother’s desperate wish to see her daughter married, but as an appreciation of hybridity and an acceptance of fluidity. We are told that Margaret had been frustrated with Clara’s diagnosis after her injury: “[Margaret and Noel] did not think, after all, in terms of IQ, ‘retarded mentality,’ and ‘adult capabilities.’ And why, oh why, Mrs. Johnson had often thought . . . should anyone think of another human being in light of a set of terms?” (45). In bringing about Clara’s marriage, Margaret has momentarily escaped these terms, and, as importantly, her experiences in Italy have also allowed her to, at least temporarily, dismantle the equally constrictive terms that defined her own life in Winston-Salem. The question left for Spencer’s readers, then, seems to be, can any of this last? Most obviously, can the marriage Margaret has worked so hard to bring about possibly endure? And, just as importantly, can Margaret’s more complex—and less comforting—understanding of home continue to guide her when she returns to WinstonSalem? While Spencer has said in interviews that “I really don’t know whether Clara’s marriage will last,” the novella is rather discouraging on this point (Broadwell and Hoag 69). Yet, while Clara’s marriage seems doomed, we are given a much more optimistic view of Margaret’s ability to translate her experiences abroad to her life in Winston-Salem. These divergent forecasts are dependent upon the novella’s final scene, which is not the fairy tale moment defined by the bride and groom’s recessional, but rather Margaret’s recollection of one of the most pivotal moments in Clara and Fabrizio’s courtship, and, arguably, one of the most crucial moments in the narrative itself: when Margaret and Signor Naccarelli are first introduced at the festival of San Giovanni, Margaret is determined to share Clara’s condition with him and thus to end the relationship. Yet, at the moment she chooses to speak, a cannon misfires and a bystander is hit. Chaos ensues and Signor Naccarelli runs to help the man, effectively interrupting Margaret’s confession. She later thinks to herself, “Was it her fault a cannon had gone off just when she meant to explain?” (42). Margaret’s presumption here—that she had no other opportunity to speak—is clearly preposterous, but it is paralleled by the powerful imagery of the incident: we are told that “in the strong sun, the flash of the powder, which must have been considerable by another light, had been all but negated” (16). The suggestion here is

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that the light of the truth is dwarfed by the impossibly romantic light of Italy. Yet, while the incident is initially banished from Margaret’s mind, in the novella’s closing paragraphs she finally inquires what happened to the man and we learn that he has died. Thus the novella ends with the suggestion that while it is possible to deny the truth, the truth’s power is still indisputable: the cannon’s blast may have been muted by the sun, but it was still deadly. This symbolism confirms our suspicions, then, and we believe that Clara’s truth also will emerge eventually, even in a Florentine setting. Margaret’s recollection of the accident at the end of the novella is also interesting, however, because it is much more detailed than her initial observation, which is informed primarily by shock. In remembering the accident on Clara’s wedding day, she summons up a rather graphic image of the victim: “In desperate motion through the flickering rhythms of the ‘event,’ he went on and on in glimpses, trying to get up, while near him, silent in bronze, Cellini’s Perseus, in the calm repose of triumph, held aloft the Medusa’s head” (65). This image is a gripping one in a number of ways, but most significant to our understanding of Margaret’s development is that this scene, one that is crucial to the novella’s plot development as well as its conclusion, is an illustration of the ways in which the power of binaries has been disrupted during Margaret’s time in Italy: in the unlikely triumvirate of Perseus, Medusa, and the wounded man, we are not merely presented with good and evil, victor and vanquished, but also a victim of accident, a role that is simultaneously more nebulous and more powerful than the heroic posture of Perseus or the dramatic defeat of Medea. Tellingly, immediately upon recalling the image Margaret interrupts herself, saying to no one in particular, “I did the right thing . . . I know I did” (65). But just as quickly she reaches for the easy security of simple binaries, she dismisses them, thinking, “ ‘The right thing’: what was it?” (65). In The Light in the Piazza’s final lines then, we see that Margaret, while tempted to cling to the sorts of absolutes that had defined her life in Winston-Salem, now recognizes them as fictions. Thus the cannon’s explosion functions to illuminate our understanding of both Clara’s fate and Margaret’s acceptance of hybrid identity; yet we may also see this symbolism as central to Spencer’s larger project in The Light in the Piazza. While, clearly, the novella breaks from the themes and settings of Spencer’s Mississippi novels, it also radically rejects the expectations of the Renaissance tradition to which those novels closely adhere: in The Light in the Piazza, stoicism is supplanted by a privileging of emotion; male hierarchies are not

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authoritative, but rather are deemed all but impotent; and home is not a space of security but a site of flux. In The Light in the Piazza, then, a work she once classified as an “amusement,” Spencer is, in fact, posing a serious challenge to the southern canon, suggesting that many of its core certainties may be reconsidered (Haley 16). Thus, in a work that features an exploding antique cannon as its crucial symbol, Spencer in effect moves to explode the outdated southern canon.10 Certainly, the spark that is ignited in The Light in the Piazza burns bright in the work that follows it, novels and stories that continue to explore the notion of “home ground” in new ways and that employ a vocabulary that this distinct from the Fugitive-Agrarian rhetoric that had defined her earliest work.

CH A P T ER

3

Inhabiting the Unhomely Moment in Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories

After the publication of The Light in the Piazza, Elizabeth Spencer did not abandon the South as either a setting or a central concern in her fiction; however, as she explained in a 1981 interview, her experiences in Italy led her to believe that “it would be exciting to be a roving spirit in one’s work instead of a fixed planet” (J. Jones 91). As a result, Spencer’s next three major novels, No Place for an Angel (1967), The Snare (1972), and The Salt Line (1984), speak to her desire to further challenge the “gravitational pull” of traditional southern identity that had informed her early work: while these later novels are largely set in the South, each novel echoes The Light in the Piazza’s investigation of the inherent hybridity of southern identity in the modern world.1 In a December 3, 1982, letter to Walker Percy, Spencer explains that all three novels were intended to be articulations of what “I think of as non-Southern-type views of things in my (our) time”; despite their often southern settings, then, the later novels resist the conventions of Renaissance literature in their treatment of these “non-southern” themes and in their subsequent insistence on the fluidity of southern identity (Percy Collection). Moreover, the borders of the South itself become increasingly porous in these later novels. As Warren French observed in an April 11, 1984, letter to Spencer, her return to a Mississippi setting in The Salt Line radically diverges from the depictions of Delta life that had defined her first three novels: I was very interested to see that you have gone back to a Mississippi setting, but this time with what is distinctly a “sunbelt” novel. The Gulf Coast, which never used to be typical of the South and was largely unknown elsewhere, is now the kind of region that the present college generation thinks of when one mentions the South. It’s curious to find

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that the world of William Faulkner has become “history.” (Spencer Collection NLC)

In employing settings such as Dallas, Florida, New Orleans, and the Gulf Coast, for example, Spencer moves from the Deep South of Faulkner and the Agrarians to the New South, an ambiguous, evolving space not wholly unlike the “foreign” spaces she explores in The Light in the Piazza.2 This shift represents yet another way in which Spencer’s work navigates the paradoxical terrain she first identified in The Light in the Piazza: the South in these novels is in many ways wholly recognizable, yet, in its abandonment of traditional values, it is also evacuated of much of its mythic power. Yet, while each of Spencer’s later novels challenges prevailing notions of southernness, it is her short fiction of this period that most forcefully reflects her growing interest in the uncertainty of southern identity and the indeterminacy of the southern home. Spencer had been writing short stories fairly regularly since the beginning of her career, but following her remove to Canada in 1958, her interest in the form had been renewed. She explained in a 1974 interview that I started writing short stories very consciously because my experiences after I left the South got more fragmented and I couldn’t see life in novelistic terms in the sense of whole segments of society anymore. The nature of experience that was being forced on me was fragmented. You would know people for a short period of time. You would have experiences that didn’t relate to a long historical past or express a continuity in society carrying it forward. (Weaver 52)

Distanced (both geographically and temporally) from the pervasive sense of “continuity” evident in Carrollton, Teoc, and Nashville, Spencer found herself liberated not only from the notion of a hegemonic construction of southern identity but from the constraints of the novel. In addition to addressing the fragmentation of experience, then, her short stories function as a vital alternative to what she has identified as the “deliberate” nature of the novel form and of the structured tradition of which it is a part (Kitchings 107). Thus, it is not surprising that Spencer’s short fiction often makes riskier moves than those allowed by her novels, maneuvers that are typified by her experimentation with tone and formal technique and by her exploration of an extraordinarily diverse range of characters and situations. It is working in this genre, then, that Spencer is often able to most effectively probe the shifting and elusive nature of home.

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While Spencer’s short fiction is almost universally acclaimed—in fact, she is often better known as a short story writer than a novelist— nowhere is the complexity of her vision of home clearer than in her 1988 collection, Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories. Spencer’s previous collections either attempt to locate a single voice within her work, as evinced in the 1981 collection Marilee, or seek to provide a sense of the development of Spencer’s oeuvre over a measurable period of time—Ship Island and Other Stories (1968) includes works composed over a twenty-year span and The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1981) brings together almost all of her short fiction, save The Light in the Piazza.3 Conversely, Jack of Diamonds is a small, yet broadly focused, collection of Spencer’s mature short fiction. Written in the 1980s, more than two decades after she had decamped for Montreal, the five stories contained in Jack of Diamonds do not echo the celebration of traditional interpretations of home palpable in Spencer’s Mississippi novels, nor do they speak to the experience of sudden displacement evident in The Light in the Piazza. Instead, the collection rejects the notion of a unified vision of home—an established ideal that must be either tacitly accepted or overtly challenged by its inhabitants—and instead provides a glimpse into multiple (and multivalent) constructions of home. In this way, Jack of Diamonds reveals the fairly radical shift in Spencer’s treatment of both home and identity, a move that was lauded by its reviewers but overlooked by scholars.4 This critical omission may be fueled, in part, by the ways in which Jack of Diamonds resolutely resists categorization: first, the collection contains no unifying setting, but instead contains two stories set in Montreal, one in Mississippi, one in upstate New York, and one that moves between Italy and Alabama; second, while all of its protagonists are women, Jack of Diamonds is populated with a diverse range of characters, from an insecure small-town Mississippian in “The Business Venture” to an urbane, middle-aged Canadian in “The Skater”; and, finally, the work is defined by an array of technical styles, from the almost-minimalist treatment of “Jean-Pierre” to the chatty narrative that comprises “The Cousins.” It is my contention, however, that it is the breadth of the compact collection that invites an exploration of its treatment of home. It is because of its geographic, thematic, and technical diversity, not in spite of it, that Jack of Diamonds is able to repeatedly interrogate the personal and cultural assumptions that inform home. Unlike her earliest work, in this collection “home” is not the bedrock of identity, but rather it functions as an uncertain space, one defined by lacunae

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as much as constancy. In these stories, then, Spencer explores the fissures that underlie varying constructions of home and the overlapping identities that result, essentially exploring what critic Homi Bhabha has called “in-between spaces” (Location of Culture 1). Bhabha’s discussion of interstitial anxiety is focused on issues of imperialism and marginalization, concerns that Spencer plays upon only tangentially, but the vocabulary he establishes here may be useful for a discussion of Spencer’s work in that central to his argument is the claim that “ ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (1–2). It is the image suggested here—one of the raw self emerging from tectonic collision—that links the stories in Spencer’s collection. Bhabha’s thinking may also shape our understanding of Spencer’s project in Jack of Diamonds in his appropriation of Freud’s unheimlich, which he identifies as “unhomeliness,” or the confusion created by the overlap of home and the world. In Bhabha’s heuristic, unhomeliness is not to be confused with homelessness; rather, it is the bewilderment experienced in “rite[s] of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiation” (9). He notes that the sensation may “[creep] up on you stealthily as your own shadow” forcing you to “[take] the measure of your dwelling,” which, he explains, both shrinks and “expands enormously” under such consideration (9). In other words, unhomeliness is the complete disorientation suffered after sudden contact with a series of personal or cultural assumptions different from one’s own; it is in this state that the notion of home is called into question, if not wholly reconfigured. And while Bhabha suggests that the notion of unhomeliness is most useful in a consideration of the postcolonial condition, he demonstrates flexibility in the term’s use, noting that the sensation is evident “in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites” and citing Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and Toni Morrison’s Beloved as examples of texts in which the domestic space is interrupted and ultimately reinterpreted through the “unhomely moment” (9). In short, the unhomely moment insists upon a recalculation of “the world-in-the-home” (emphasis Bhabha’s; 11).5 The notion of unhomeliness is crucial to an evaluation of Jack of Diamonds in that it offers a means of addressing the fundamental shift in Spencer’s depiction of home. In her earliest work, Spencer appropriates a traditional construction of the southern home, one that relies upon an acknowledgment of the antebellum values that

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inform it. As I discuss in the first two chapters, home is a concept that is both tightly inscribed and almost universally recognized in the southern canon. In Jack of Diamonds, however, Spencer has all but abandoned this notion of home, freeing it from its southern context to explore it anew. Instead of offering a home that is securely entrenched in tradition and communal recognition, Spencer explores a variety of domestic spaces, some southern and others northern or Canadian, that have been disrupted by “extra-territorial initiation.” As a result, place, that “sacred” component of southern identity, is called into question, and home becomes the site of constant renegotiation.6 Thus the collection functions as a subtle meditation on the “invasion of domestic spaces,” as Bhabha identifies it, and each of its stories explores the spiritual unease that marks a space that previously has been coded as a sanctuary.

“Falling Through Space”: “Jean-Pierre” The first story in Jack of Diamonds, “Jean Pierre,” is also the collection’s most elusive. The story’s protagonist, a young woman named Callie, is a spiritual orphan of sorts; she has remained in Montreal after her father and his wife have moved to California, and her sister, Bea, who has been designated as Callie’s caretaker, allows her to move out of their shared house after Bea gets married. Moreover, Callie seems to be without any identifiable friends, and her life is relatively solitary until she meets Jean-Pierre Courtois, a Québécois man who seems an improbable match for her. Not only is Jean-Pierre much older than Callie and newly (and rather mysteriously) widowed, but from their first meeting, he treats her with disdain: he refuses to speak to her throughout the evening and then suddenly kisses her at the end of the night, a move that Callie reads as an “act of contempt” (5). Yet Callie finds herself captivated by Jean-Pierre, and without fully understanding her decision, she continues to see him. After their second date, she stands in her doorway, contemplating their strange courtship: The scene just past was a still-spinning disk, and she clung dizzily to its center, thinking, I’ve never got into things like this before. But then maybe it had to happen sometime, with somebody. And maybe, she thought, it was why she’d stayed on in Montreal alone rather than going to California, why she’d moved out of her sister’s house . . . (6)

Callie’s attraction to Jean-Pierre, then, suggests a means of delving deeper into the displacement she is already experiencing. Her inability

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to locate herself within her family’s hierarchy or within the communities of Montreal is exaggerated by the disorientation she experiences after meeting Jean-Pierre; she seems both terrified and thrilled by the fact that his attention transforms the recognizable world into a “stillspinning disk” and, as a result, defies the fixed environment in which she does not seem to fit. Callie’s powerful but curious response to Jean-Pierre is not triggered solely by the first flush of attraction or even by his surprisingly rude treatment of her, but also by the fact that, like Callie, Jean-Pierre does not “belong.” However, while Callie’s feelings of isolation are prompted primarily by her withdrawal from “the bitter family life” that follows her mother’s death, Jean-Pierre’s alienation is the result of a more dramatic—and a more systematic—form of disenfranchisement (5). Callie initially observes that he stands out from others in barely perceptible ways; for example, she notes that while his “clothes were neat [and] his tie quiet,” he is “set off” by “the slight gleam of artificial gloss on his thick hair, and the gold he wore—cuff links, ring, and tie clip, all very bright” (4). Callie instinctively understands that these quirks in Jean-Pierre’s appearance, however subtle, function as cultural signifiers that differentiate him from Montreal’s English descendants; he is, in fact, visibly marked as a French Québécois, and Callie knows that her stepmother, in a move typical of the English, would dismiss Jean-Pierre “for good and all” after only glimpsing him (4). It is with this understanding that Callie is able to comprehend, or at least accept, Jean-Pierre’s boorish treatment of her. She views his contempt as typical of the Québécois, noting simply that “[t]he French did not like English-speaking people” (5). This aversion is a defensive mechanism of sorts, a response to the marginalization of the French at the hands of Montreal’s self-identified “English” inhabitants. Yet Jean-Pierre’s status as a Québécois does not merely signify “inferiority” to the English, but represents a sort of placelessness (5). When Callie’s sister, Bea, objects to her relationship with Jean-Pierre, for example, she insists, “You can’t do this, Callie. He’s one of those awful Quebec people. They left France so long ago nobody there knows they exist. We met someone from Paris the other day who still couldn’t understand their French after two weeks here” (6). Thus, the Québécois occupy a distinctly ambivalent position: they are neither English nor French, and thus are deemed “awful,” incapable of being interpreted in Montreal, their adopted land, or France, their homeland. Bea, who Callie recognizes as actively “cultivat[ing] an English tone,” urges Callie to follow her own model: her marriage to

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the conventional Bart, a banker, solidifies her own Englishness (6–7). In a comic example of snobbery, she tells Callie, “Bart and I make an impression, I know that. Even our names go together . . . But ‘JeanPierre and Callie,’ how does that sound?” (7). Here, Bea attempts to underscore the impossibility of cross-cultural exchange by pointing to the cacophonic quality of the synthesis of Callie and Jean-Pierre’s names, a union that most certainly will not “make the right impression” in a society clinging to its Englishness. Callie acknowledges that many of Bea’s arguments are not unfounded. She agrees that combination of her name and JeanPierre’s name is indeed “terrible,” and she privately notes that his French is a bastardization of the language (7). Furthermore, she sees the placelessness that troubles Bea echoed in other respects of JeanPierre’s life: he owns and manages two apartment buildings, both of which are overcrowded and ill-kept and that remind Callie more of crowded “rush hour buses” than of a conventional home (10). Thus, his occupation further underscores his ambiguous connection to any identifiable home, and, moreover, the fact that he acts as a slumlord complicates his role as a marginalized figure. In addition, despite his undeniable Québécois status, Callie regularly finds herself questioning his nationality: she notes that he is “dark, almost swart,” and later thinks that he looks “almost Spanish” (4, 10). Yet, despite the ways in which Jean-Pierre is repeatedly disenfranchised—from the English society that dominates Montreal, from the French society that shuns its Canadian descendants, and even from the subjugated role that he presumably occupies—Callie is adamant that it is Jean-Pierre “with whom she felt she belonged” (8). It is this paradox—that Callie only “belongs” with someone who does not belong in any identifiable niche of society—that informs Callie’s initial sense of unhomeliness. Yet it is only after their marriage that Callie truly is thrust into the unhomely moment that Homi Bhabha describes in The Location of Culture. After a year together, Jean-Pierre suddenly disappears, leaving Callie a note stating that “c’est necessaire” but providing no explanation for his absence and no estimated time of his return (11). Until this point in their marriage, Callie is unhomed in a voluntary sense; she sees in Jean-Pierre a complex reflection of her own alienation, and in embracing his estrangement she works to forge an alternate form of home with him. However, Jean-Pierre’s disappearance reveals the gap between their perceived levels of disenfranchisement. Unlike Callie, Jean-Pierre is able to slip away from the known world and exist in an environment that remains invisible, and, as importantly, inaccessible to her. His disappearance suggests the monumental nature of the

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chasm created by the unhomely, and even as evidence of Jean-Pierre’s financial and legal troubles mounts, Callie does not attempt to solve the mystery of his absence; she finds that “[s]he was actually afraid of knowing” why he has left or where he has gone (11). In fact, she becomes especially anxious when she is told that “the Québécois, if they get in trouble or get scared . . . take to the bush. Coureurs des bois. They go to places like Chicoutimi, Rimouski, Rivière du Loup, from there upriver, downriver, into the woods”; Callie is haunted by the “strange [place] names” that seem unmappable in her mind and that appear to lead in all directions simultaneously (21, 24). It is JeanPierre’s absence, then, more so than his presence, that brings about a sudden recognition of “the world-in-the-home.” Callie realizes that the boundaries that have circumscribed their domestic space, even those fraught with social and political dissonance, are illusory. As a result, Callie finds herself immersed in the paradoxes inherent in the unhomely state. This is made manifest when the narrative voice tells us: “All absences are mysterious. Whether the absence is understood or not, the absent person is, somehow, not really gone. ‘Not gone,’ Callie wrote down on her grocery list” (13). Not only is Callie haunted by both Jean-Pierre’s absence and his imagined presence, but his disappearance defines the most mundane elements of Callie’s life—it appears as a benign entry on the grocery list—as well as shaping her worldview. Overwhelmed by the impossible contradictions created by his disappearance, she entrenches herself in her home, seeking relief from the terror of disorientation. Throughout the months of Jean-Pierre’s absence, Callie spends many of her days sunbathing in a neighbor’s lounge chair. Her passivity speaks to her feelings of helplessness, of course, but, in some ways, the chaise she occupies is equally significant: the neighbor has chained the chair to their shared fence to prevent it from being stolen, and thus Callie finds herself quite literally tied to home. This self-imprisonment operates as an artificial but important means of securing her place in the world; by lashing herself to home, Callie seeks to escape the “traumatic ambivalence” of her situation (Bhabha 11). In addition to sunbathing, Callie turns to a number of other talismans to ward off the terror of dislocation, including sleeping pills, but she is able to quell her anxiety most effectively by reading the complete works of Emily Dickinson. In an immediate sense, she views Dickinson as a diversion: Callie has taken a part-time job as a librarian and she reads when she has no other work, half-hoping that the volume “might just last all summer; poetry went much more slowly than a novel” (14). Yet Dickinson’s poetry also seems an obvious choice for

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Callie: Dickinson famously represents an exaggerated form of reclusiveness and an intimate, if not obsessive, connection to home. Thus, while Callie casually lists the “lessons” of Dickinson’s work—“that nature was marvelous but cruel, that death was inexorable, that to lose your love was another sort of death, that God was somebody whom, if you had any sense at all you had to argue with”—she is also drawn to a less obvious theme in Dickinson’s work: that of the circumscribed home (14). Callie finds herself imagining the New England that Dickinson describes as both an impenetrable sanctuary and as a space that, in contrast to her own environment, provides resolution. She begins to dream about visiting New England, a more tangible fantasy, perhaps, than wishing for Jean-Pierre’s return. However, as feminist critics have long noted, Emily Dickinson’s work cannot be easily reduced to a series of simple, traditionally “feminine” themes—love, nature, and faith—nor can Dickinson’s treatment of home be read as wholly reverential. Instead, as Thomas Foster observes, she regularly “departs from the [prevailing] models of domestic womanhood . . . in her willingness to imagine new experiences of space that associate it with fluid possibilities rather than certain confinement” (27). In this way, Callie’s exploration of Dickinson’s work reveals not merely a longing for a stable home but a recognition of the ways in which home is a complex, shifting construction. The poems that seem to hold Callie’s attention focus on loss, a fact that is not surprising given that she is seeking meaning in Jean-Pierre’s absence, but several of these poems also speak to the terrors of unhomeliness. For example, Callie is puzzled by Poem 376: Of Course—I prayed— And did God Care? He cared as much as on the Air A Bird—had stamped her foot— And cried “Give Me”— My Reason—Life— I had not had—but for Yourself— ‘Twere better Charity To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb— Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb— Than this smart Misery.

Here the persona expresses frustration with God, who seems to treat her concerns as being as trivial as those of a bird, and she concludes that God would have been more merciful if He had never created her, leaving her instead in “the Atom’s Tomb.” Thus, on an immediate

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level the poem articulates anger at having to live in a condition characterized by divine indifference, yet the images that Dickinson juxtaposes in the poem also suggest a number of paradoxes that ultimately render her claims problematic. The bird, which the persona invokes as a double to demonstrate her own inferior position in God’s eyes and her subsequent powerlessness, is also associated with flight and limitless freedom; similarly, the image of the “Atom’s Tomb,” an unimaginably constricted space, is employed to describe both nothingness and an ambiguous sense of “merriment” and “gaiety.” Thus, the persona’s anger at God dissolves into ambivalence as the images of independence and impotence, life and lifelessness, and gaiety and suffering become jumbled together. The persona is no longer able to construct a simple set of binaries that give shape to her dilemma, and, instead is immersed in the “interstitial intimacy” of “the beyond” (Bhabha 13, 1).7 The ambiguous image of the Atom’s Tomb resonates throughout the second half of “Jean-Pierre” as Callie, like the persona of Dickinson’s poem, struggles to orient herself. She is prompted in her search by Simon Weiss, a young man who she meets in the library. While Simon helps her wrestle with Dickinson’s meaning—it is Simon who proposes that the Atom’s Tomb represents the unborn self—he is, ultimately, just as lost as Callie. He is out of work and spends his days reading in the library, his infant daughter at his side; like Callie, he is seeking the answers ostensibly promised by literature, or, at the very least, an ordered place to spend his time. Simon, too, is described in the rhetoric of dislocation: when Callie asks him if he is frightened by his unemployment, he replies, “Of course,” and illustrates his fear by explaining, “This morning . . . I fell over the stroller on my way for the mail. I knew it was there, but I fell over it” (17). His response is seemingly a non sequitur, but, in fact, Simon is attempting to communicate his extreme disorientation. His Jewishness, we are led to speculate, marginalizes him much like Jean-Pierre’s status as a Québécois dispossesses Callie and Jean-Pierre; moreover, Simon’s sudden unemployment further destabilizes him. He sees in Callie a kindred spirit, and suggests that they befriend one another. When Callie expresses her skepticism, noting, in essence, that two flailing souls seem incapable of helping one another, he explains, “[I]f you’re sinking in the ocean, you need somebody to pull you out. But if you’re falling through space, a companion in flight is the best you can hope for” (18). Callie answers by stating simply, “I don’t know which it is”; like Dickinson’s persona, she is uncertain if she wishes to embrace the unhomely moment or to attempt to free herself from it (18).

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Yet Callie demurs when Simon offers to take her to New England; the trip presents another diversion from her suspended existence in Jean-Pierre’s absence, and more importantly it suggests a visit to the home that is idealized in Dickinson’s work. The quarry that they choose as a picnic spot once they have arrived, however, does not provide easy answers, but instead further underscores the uncertain boundaries that Callie has encountered since meeting Jean-Pierre. She and Simon eat in a section of the quarry that is defined by absence: the rocks that they sit on are “flat from having had other rock cut away from them” (19). And while the rocks themselves are fragmented and suggest a sense of incompleteness, Callie also is struck by the “awesome finalities” suggested by the space as a whole: the quarry is bisected by a path that “slanted downward, and its chopped-out walls rose higher on either side” (23, 20). Furthermore, at the center of the quarry is a pond with “rocky sides, sloping up out of the water, and she thought the water was from rain, for there was no movement in it, no exit for it” (20). Yet Callie’s response to the quarry represents an important shift in her perspective: neither the rocks’ voids nor the quarry’s imposing walls inspire terror. Instead, Callie is attracted to the “chopped-out” rocks, finding that “their surface was smooth in places, hot, almost comfortable” (19). She is even able to sleep in one of the niches; untroubled by the absence it represents, she unconsciously completes its void with her own body. Similarly, Callie is also at ease when she is wading in the water that has been trapped by the quarry’s steep walls; she does not fear becoming trapped herself and instead imagines the pond to be “bottomless” (21). Therefore, in its voids and its “finalities” the quarry is a paradoxical space, yet like Dickinson’s Atom’s Tomb, which is simultaneously “Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb,” the quarry cannot be defined in terms of simple binaries; instead, absences suggest wholeness and boundaries evoke endlessness. Sensing this, perhaps, Callie calls the quarry the Atom’s Tomb and playfully identifies a woman who interrupts her picnic with Simon as Emily Dickinson. Thus, while the visit to New England replicates the ambiguities and uncertainties that have marked Callie’s marriage, her experience in “the Atom’s tomb” triggers what Bhabha identifies as “the stirring of emancipation,” or a means of understanding her experience (Location of Culture 16). Bhabha does not suggest that those who have experienced the unhomely moment undergo a sudden epiphany that relieves them of their enormous psychic burden, but rather he posits that through the recognition of paradox, the unhomely can be transfigured into a knowledge of both Self and Other, “Eros and

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Agape together” (17). Callie comes to this knowledge by rejecting Simon’s anxieties as a true reflection of her own. He confesses to her that before they are interrupted by “Emily Dickinson” he had been allowing himself to imagine his love for her. Simon never pressures Callie for a response, but in articulating these feelings he once again proposes a type of communion, that experienced by those “falling through space.” Callie dismisses his admission, however, and in doing so she rejects the terror that still grips Simon and, instead, accepts a world where boundaries are both diverse and porous. It is not surprising, then, that as soon as Simon drops her off near her apartment, Callie realizes that Jean-Pierre has returned. His reappearance does not signify a resolution; in fact, when she asks him where he has been, he replies only, “Une grosse question” (24). For Callie, however, the resolution has already occurred. She thinks to herself, “The moment I turned back . . . was in a deserted quarry, beside a stone-dead pool, with another man’s voice talking, sumac looking down; where, when you turned, were you?” (25). Thus, she emphasizes not Jean-Pierre’s absence or her own prolonged uncertainty, but the moment in which these conditions lose their relevance. We see, then, that Callie “turns back” not to Jean-Pierre explicitly, but to a new vision of home; having been thrust into the unhomely moment, she emerges with a need not for stability or “belonging,” but with an understanding of the essential fluidity of home. She is relieved of her terror and so finds that she is capable of locating herself in an environment where the boundaries between the home and the world are not always clear, where voids and finalities, or Dickinson’s “Merry and Nought,” must coexist. In many ways, “Jean-Pierre” is atypical of Spencer’s work. Unlike most of Spencer’s female protagonists, who, like Margaret Johnson, are often engagingly transparent, Callie is to some extent as mysterious as Jean-Pierre himself. By merely sketching Callie, rather than fully exploring her responses to Jean-Pierre’s absence, Spencer shifts the emphasis of the story from an individual’s experience to a collective condition: “Jean-Pierre” is as much an exploration of the emotional and spiritual dislocation as it is a treatment of a single relationship. It asks the reader not only to witness the bonds created by a “powerful sexual attraction,” as Spencer has stated, but to experience with Callie the “interstitial intimacy” inherent in the unhomely moment: Callie’s disorientation is necessarily shared by the story’s readers, and her acceptance of a shifting notion of home is mirrored in the readers’ appreciation of what Madison Smartt Bell identifies as its “strange” ending (Pond 146, 6). Thus, Spencer begins the

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collection by deliberately “unhoming” both her characters and her readers rather than grounding them. As a result, while the stories that follow “Jean-Pierre” are more conventional in their shared emphasis on character development, all of the stories in Jack of Diamonds are informed by the relentless interrogation of home in “Jean-Pierre” and its suggestion of alternate models of belonging.

Shifting Boundaries and the Familial Home: “The Cousins,” “Jack of Diamonds,” and “The Skater” The next two stories in the collection, “The Cousins” and “Jack of Diamonds,” and the collection’s final story, “The Skater,” build on the destabilization of the domestic space evident in “Jean-Pierre,” yet each of these stories is also specifically concerned with the ways in which family defines home for its protagonist. Like Callie, each protagonist finds herself facing the unhomely moment unexpectedly, yet while Callie ultimately is able to embrace the uncertainty that engulfs her, the protagonists of “The Cousins,” “Jack of Diamonds,” and “The Skater” resist this sort of transformation because they cling, often desperately, to the belief that the familial relationships they have used to define themselves are both fixed and reassuring. Thus, if the conclusion of “Jean-Pierre” speaks to the possibility of fully “emancipating” one’s self from a dependence upon a seemingly absolute construction of home, these three stories reveal the complications inherent in such a project. Interestingly, the protagonist who is most successful in coming to terms with the presence of “the world-in-the home” is also the youngest. In “Jack of Diamonds,” the collection’s title story, the protagonist, seventeen-year-old Rosalind Jennings, struggles to come to terms with a shifting home. Rosalind has always associated home with her family; she is an only child whose world has largely been defined by her parents. Three years before the story is set, however, Rosalind’s mother is killed in a car accident, and her father, Nat, has since remarried. His new wife, Eva, is respectful of Rosalind, often deferring to her in small matters and speaking kindly of her mother whenever appropriate. Eva’s conscious desire not to displace Rosalind is evident in her decision to leave Rosalind’s room intact when she moves into the family’s Manhattan apartment, even though its use of rosecovered patterns contrasts with her own, more sophisticated style. Despite Eva’s consideration, however, Rosalind is aware of the less explicit ways that her place in the apartment has been both reduced

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and redefined: Eva and Nat have become what Rosalind identifies as “a new ‘Them,’ ” a quasi-Other that has formed in her mother’s absence and that leaves Rosalind’s own position in the family uncertain (79). Rosalind is thrilled, then, when her father impulsively decides that they will all make a trip to the family’s cottage at Lake George in upstate New York. While they have not visited the cottage since her mother’s death—her mother was killed while she was driving from Lake George to the city—Rosalind identifies the house with happy memories of her family, and when she silently addresses her mother, she acknowledges that “this was your place” (104). She is especially pleased that her father has given her permission to travel to Lake George ahead of him and Eva; not only does his acquiescence indicate that she is capable of handling the responsibilities involved in opening the house for the season, but it suggests that he understands that she may want to reconnect with the space privately. In this way, her father seems to silently acknowledge—and perhaps share—the grief that Rosalind may experience in revisiting the cottage. She believes, “[I]t was for some unspoken reason that he had wanted her to go. And she knew that it was right for her to do it, not only to see about things. It was an important journey. For both of them? Yes for them both” (82). Thus, the trip not only offers Rosalind a means of mourning her mother’s absence, but it suggests the possibility of reconnecting with her father and thus temporarily exhuming the “Old Us” that has been subsumed by the “New Them” created by his remarriage. When Rosalind arrives at the cottage, she finds that the sensation of home has been carefully preserved. While her mother’s ghost, which she expects to encounter as soon as she enters, never manifests itself in a literal sense, Rosalind feels a connection with her mother that is immediate and intense: when she first sees the cottage, she is moved by the image of the “boughs around it, pine and oak, pressed down like protective arms” (83). Rosalind reads the cottage as possessing a distinctly maternal power, and she responds with an uninhibited vulnerability: she runs to its front door “and tried the knob with the confidence of a child running to her mother, only to find it locked, naturally; then, with a child’s abandon, she flung her arms against the paneling, hearing her heart thump on the wood until Mr. Thibodeau [the caretaker] gently detached her little by little as though she had got stuck there” (83). Here, tree limbs serve as embracing arms and a door functions as a mother’s welcoming breast: the cottage is not simply a “homeplace,” a vessel of happy memories, but it functions as a substitute for family and an affirmation of love and security.

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Yet, while Rosalind’s sense of belonging is confirmed by her ability to recognize the house’s sounds and to find comfort in its familiar silences, after only a few moments of quiet communion, the benign noises that Rosalind hears are transformed into more troubling voices, memories of angry fights between her parents. She suddenly recalls the accusations that they have thrown at each other, and the fragments of these arguments that resurface in the now empty house reflect mistrust, resentment, and frustration. Furthermore, in an even more troubling discovery, Rosalind comes across a scarf that is not her mother’s and, instead, smells of Eva’s perfume. Since Eva has announced that this is her first visit to the cottage, Rosalind is confounded by the scarf’s presence, and it calls into question the narrative of Eva and Nat’s courtship, which Rosalind has been told originated after her mother’s death. Within a short period of time, then, the secure home the cottage represents is fundamentally disrupted: Rosalind’s memories of arguments between her parents and her discovery of Eva’s earlier visits suggest that the cottage is not merely a marital palimpsest upon which Eva is now adding her own story—the sort of transformation we see evinced at the New York apartment— but that the original narrative, in which Rosalind and her parents comprise a perfect circle, is now deeply rent. In fact, Rosalind’s “discovery” is not particularly new. As a witness to many of her parents’ fights, Rosalind often chose to be lulled by her mother’s appeal that she “[j]ust forget it now, tomorrow it won’t seem real. We all love each other” (86). For the most part, Rosalind’s unwavering belief in this idealized notion of family had been rewarded; she notes that the “tomorrows” that her mother promised were indeed “clear and bright,” and the re-emergence of affection between her parents easily reassured her of her own identity within the family’s familiar structure (86). Dismissing these fights at the time speaks to a desire to cling to a sense of innocence; yet Rosalind’s continued refusal to consider the truth of her parents’ relationship reveals a deep yearning for a sense of security: while she is on the brink of adulthood—at eighteen, we assume that Rosalind is only a year or so away from the promise of college and an independent life—she still defines herself in terms of her connection to home. This need to be able to identify “her place” may explain why Rosalind’s anxiety is quickly assuaged when her father and Eva arrive at the cottage, occupying roles that seem unchanged by Rosalind’s discovery: Eva is, as always, gracious and Nat is customarily buoyant. Nat plays “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” on the piano, a song that both serves as Rosalind’s anthem and recalls the “romantic themes” with which her parents

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had always surrounded her (78). Despite the fact that cottage’s piano is obviously out of tune, certainly an ominous sign, Rosalind dismisses her growing suspicion that her parents’ marriage had not been as ideal as she recalls and allows herself to be swept up in the sense of sanctuary that the song suggests. Yet if Nat and Eva’s arrival momentarily represents a return to normalcy, Rosalind must also suspect that this mood is largely manufactured. Nat is a choreographer and Eva an actress; while Rosalind cannot be sure of the extent of their “performance,” she is cognizant on some level of their capacity to effectively stage a version of home. She later recalls once telling her mother that Nat resembles the Jack of Diamonds in the family’s deck of cards. At the time, Rosalind is thinking of the Jack’s distinctive cleft chin and engaging smile, characteristics that are shared by her father; yet, as a young woman, she is able to recognize the likeness that her mother apprehends, that of a two-faced figure, a man who can artfully present a façade to his audience while hiding his more authentic self. As a child, Rosalind has appreciated her father’s ability to perform for her: she sees his broad smile as his “face for her, his gift” (99). As she attempts to renegotiate the space of the cottage in her mother’s absence, though, she finds the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy her father’s performance—and, consequently, the secure home it suggests—increasingly difficult. Moreover, in almost every one of her encounters in Lake George, Rosalind is faced with constructions of home that seem to echo the sorts of distortions she is attempting to deny in her own life. This is first evident when she meets up with Paul and Elaine Dunbar, the precocious brother and sister who are living in their parents’ house at the lake. Rosalind instantly recalls “the big house their family owned—‘the villa’ her father called it—important grounds around it, and a long frontage on the lake” (88). The Dunbars seem almost over-invested with a sense of belonging: their wealth invites a sense of entitlement, and their close connection with one another further underscores the sense of security that Rosalind covets. The Dunbars’ ability to recall Rosalind’s mother extends their own sense of belonging to Rosalind: they are able to “place” her, thus linking her to their own fixity. Yet Paul and Elaine are not as settled as they appear. When Rosalind visits them, she finds that much of the magnificent Dunbar house is inaccessible—it is draped in dust-covers until the summer— and she later learns that the siblings are in Lake George because they have been suspended from their boarding school. Even more troubling than this double displacement is the odd nature of their relationship,

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which is rumored to be incestuous. Paul and Elaine seem to be propelled by a need to explode the boundaries associated with home, and sex—either between themselves or with others—offers a way to challenge its core values. In a humiliating episode, they take Rosalind on a hike in which Paul kisses her while Elaine surreptitiously takes photographs to document his conquest. Thus, the Dunbars’ intimacy speaks to instability rather than security, and their desire to challenge all boundaries—moral, social, familial—means that they are exempt from the kind of security Rosalind is seeking. If Elaine and Paul represent the potential volatility of those presumed to be ensconced in a stable home, then Henry Fenwick, their classmate, is their foil: unlike the wealthy Dunbars, Fenwick, as he is called, is the son of a junk dealer, a “townie” who lives in a house that is “bare of paint and run-down” (95). Yet whereas the Dunbars are characterized by a brand of eroticized deceit, Fenwick is defined by gentle sincerity that immediately attracts Rosalind. Almost everything in Fenwick’s world seems unstable, from his ramshackle house to the piles of junk that surround it to his terrifying father, a character almost overdrawn in his gruffness. Yet Fenwick is unashamed of his home or his family: for Rosalind’s birthday he gives her a small carving that his father has made in an act that signifies his pride in his father’s skills, and he is welcoming, rather than embarrassed, when Rosalind stops by his house. Moreover, Fenwick, who is home from school because he has been recognized as a mathematical genius and is working on a theorem, seems linked to facts—mathematical truths and irrefutable solutions—rather than performances, as her parents and the Dunbars are. Fenwick, then, represents an unconventional fantasy for Rosalind: she imagines that he might “[s]ay she could stay on with him, and they’d get the cottage someday and share it forever . . . That would be her dream, even if Fenwick’s daddy camped on them and smelled up the place with whiskey” (107). In this fantasy of home, Rosalind sees herself as reclaiming her parents’ cottage and living there without the artifice that she recognizes has defined their marriage. It is telling that in such a vision, even the perils of an alcoholic junk-collecting father-in-law—in short, a man who represents the absence of parental stability—are offset by the dependability Fenwick represents. Yet, despite their shared attraction, Rosalind’s relationship with Fenwick never develops, and Rosalind ultimately adopts a very different notion of her relationship to home. This shift is triggered when her father reveals that the reason he has “spontaneously” proposed the trip to Lake George is not because he wants to reincorporate

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the cottage into their lives, but because he plans to sell it. The musical Nat has been working on has been picked up by a movie studio and he plans to spend more time in California, vacationing in Palm Springs rather than upstate New York. Although deeply betrayed, Rosalind does not raise any objection to the sale of the cottage. That night, however, she slips out of the house and aimlessly roams the nearby woods until she finds herself at the Fenwicks’ house. Although she knows that Fenwick will be unable to quell her anxiety in any meaningful way—a fact she acknowledges in her wry observation that he will be incapable of understanding the “chemical process of rejection” that seems to be propelling her father and Eva from the cottage—she seeks the comfort suggested by his presence and by his intense connection to home (106). When she arrives at the Fenwicks’ house, however, she finds that a party is in progress. From her position in the woods she is able to make out the voices of many of the Lake George “townies” as they sit around a campfire, drinking, eating, singing, and gossiping. The communion that the group experiences necessarily excludes Rosalind: she is not at home here, a fact that she is further reminded of when the group begins to speculate that Nat has brought Eva to Lake George before Rosalind’s mother’s death. While she is ostensibly confused by the “indistinct mumble of phrases” that she overhears and seems not to understand that the gossip is about her own family, Rosalind instinctively recognizes that she does not belong within their literal and figurative circle, and when the family dog senses her and Fenwick comes to the edge of the woods to investigate, she flees rather than calling out to him (107). It is at this moment that Rosalind is fully unhomed. When her father announces that he is selling the cottage, she finds herself struck mute, trapped by her continuing desire not to interrupt the production of home he is choreographing. However, when she turns away from Fenwick’s home—and its implicit fantasy of reconstructing her parents’ model—she finds herself inexplicably liberated. Propelled into the undefined gulf of the unhomely, she identifies herself “strangely detached, elated” (108). It is in this frame of mind that she continues to wander through the woods, eventually passing the Dunbars’ house. Peering in the windows, Rosalind sees Paul and Elaine, “together and alone,” and although she finds their paradoxical identity familiar, she believes that she is the “negative” suggested by their image (108, 109). Finally, she finds herself by an abandoned resort hotel, whose twin signs, “No Trespassing” and “For Sale,” succinctly articulate her unhomely state (109).

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Yet Rosalind does experience unexpected moments of connection on her walk: in the woods, she stumbles across a brown bear and, rather than being fearful, Rosalind is exhilarated: “Pointing her way the [bear’s] head stopped still. She felt the gaze thrill through her with long foreverness, then drop away” (109). She immediately recalls an instance in which her mother told her very skeptical father about seeing a bear look in the cottage’s windows; in observing this bear, then, Rosalind aligns herself with her mother, and, as importantly, against her father. Yet, while Rosalind thinks of her parents as she witnesses the bear’s journey toward the lake, she also experiences a private moment of insight: we are told, “Rosalind knew herself as twice seen and twice known now, by dog and bear” (109). It is significant that as she walks in the woods, newly unhomed, her most powerful connection is not to Fenwick or her mother’s memory, but the Fenwicks’ dog and the bear: she imagines a sympathy with other beings who define themselves not through their connection to a discrete home but as existing in an open wilderness. In her wandering, then, Rosalind has adopted the persona of the bear, looking in the “windows” of the Fenwicks’ fireside circle, the Dunbars’ villa, and, finally, her own house. Like the bear, she is at home outside of these homes, and she has adopted a new, more powerful gaze, one that frees to acknowledge the fissures in her family’s past. The next day, then, Rosalind finally confronts her father. Resisting the easy consolation available in his eyes, which “offered pools of sincerity to plunge into” and, turning away from this face—his “gift”— she instead demands that he acknowledge that the cottage has value not only as real estate but as a protective domestic space (110). She tells him that she can feel her mother’s presence at the cottage, insisting, in short, that he recognize his own agency in dismantling Rosalind’s only remaining home. When Nat ignores her implicit argument, gently suggesting, “I think she might be everywhere,” Rosalind does not yield (110). Instead, she recognizes that he is engaged in further destabilizing the notion of home that she had clung to: “Maybe what he was saying was something about himself. The ground was being shifted; they were debating without saying so, and he was changing things around without saying so” (111). Ultimately, Rosalind cannot force Nat to abandon his façade, and their “debate” is largely futile. Yet, significantly, Rosalind is able to “hold her ground,” resisting the ways in which “the ground is being shifted” by her father in what is, in essence, a form of psychological three-card monte: in Nat’s rhetoric, home is constantly relocated. Rosalind seeks to openly mourn the loss of both her mother and her

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understanding of home, however, insisting, “[S]he’s here. No other places. Here,” and concluding, “You didn’t love her” (111). Her father angrily denies her accusation, but they do not argue the point further and no resolution is reached; Nat is firm in his decision to sell the cottage, and in doing so he is determined not to revisit questions of the nature of the home it offered. But while Nat refuses to recognize the ways in which his actions affect Rosalind’s future and, more importantly, her perception of the past, Rosalind is finally able to openly recognize that her vision of home has been naïve, and she is able to view her family—and her place within it—independently of Nat’s alluring performance. Like Callie, then, Rosalind is able to begin to imagine home in a new context, one that acknowledges series of shifting—and at times conflicting—boundaries. Rosalind’s “emancipation” from the terrors of the unhomely is more complicated than Callie’s in some ways, however, in that her alienation is surprising to her and, predictably, is an anathema to a young woman who has deemed her family to be sacred and has viewed their cottage as its “church” (84).8 This final rupture is evident when Rosalind and her father rejoin Eva in the cottage’s kitchen after their debate. Rosalind is once again silent, but this time her demeanor does not suggest her desire to accept the illusion of home that Nat and Eva create, but is indicative of a sense of quiet defiance. Eva offhandedly remarks that Nat and Rosalind look “like a picture” and asks Rosalind if she is interested in becoming an actress (113). Rosalind replies, “I was, but—Not now. Oh, no, not now!” (113). Thus, Rosalind overtly rejects the performances of home undertaken by her father and stepmother, and, just as importantly, the masking of emotions in which her mother had participated. At the story’s close, then, Rosalind is ready to view herself as existing outside of her parents’ model, and, ultimately to accept an alternate, more complex, version of home. * * * “The Cousins,” the longest story in the collection, is marked by a similar reliance on an illusionary construction of home. The story is narrated by the now middle-aged Ella Mason, and is primarily a recollection of her youthful exploits during a trip to Europe with two of her male cousins, Ben and Eric, and two other, more distant, relatives, Jamie and Mayfred. While, like Spencer’s three Marilee stories, “The Cousins” is often notable for Ella Mason’s charming accounts of the mores of her hometown, Martinsville, Alabama, the heart of

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the story is her quasi-incestuous affair with her cousin Eric while they are in Florence. [They are “just third cousins, kissing kin,” in Ella Mason’s words (32).] The affair is troubling to Ella Mason and Eric not only in its presumable violation of conventional familial bonds, but because it compels them both to reconsider their understanding of home: their rationale for the relationship, as well as their response to it, reveals the ways in which their transgression operates as a means of both quelling and exposing their feelings of unhomeliness. While “The Cousins” is relayed from Ella Mason’s perspective as a once widowed, once divorced, fifty-year-old woman, her tone is not the mature voice generally associated with someone of broad experience; instead, Ella Mason still exhibits the enthusiasms and indulgences of the nineteen-year-old self that she recalls in her narrative. This is especially apparent in her reverence of her two cousins, Ben and Eric. She recalls them as “young men who had studied things, knew things, read, talked, quoted. We’d go where they wanted to go, love what they planned, admire them . . . There was nothing else to be but like them, if at all possible. No one in his right mind would question that” (33). For Ella Mason, Ben and Eric represent the best of southern manhood, and thus southern identity as a whole. She remains in awe of them throughout the story, and, even thirty years later, she lists without irony numerous examples of their erudition, attractiveness, nobility, and even their occasional—although fully appropriate, she suggests—arrogance. She also reveals that Ben’s and Eric’s achievements are no casual accident, but rather are the result of their own reverence of southern masculinity: Ben has published part of his thesis on Poe, and Ella Mason recalls an instance in which he reads John Crowe Ransom’s poetry aloud to an attentive Eric. Even the cousins’ career choices reflect a studied acceptance of the expectations of southern manhood; Ben is studying literature at Sewanee with plans to continue at Yale and Eric is studying law at Emory while planning to become a writer. Thus, Ella Mason’s unadulterated admiration of her cousins is rooted both in their accomplishments and in the fact that their actions and behaviors reflect a set of ideals associated with southern gentility; in short, Ben and Eric represent the essence of home for her. This is further evinced in many of Ella Mason’s off-handed pronouncements, such as her assertion that she loves her maternal family’s house most fiercely “when nobody was in it but all of us” (35); Ben and Eric, more than her immediate family, allow Ella Mason to feel “at home.” She is thrilled by them, however, not only because “[t]hey did everything right,” but because, as she acknowledges,

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“they admitted me. I was the audience they needed” (48). Thus, while Ella Mason is not a full participant in their exchanges—she remains, for the most part, a dutiful spectator; Ben and Eric’s acceptance of her seems to elevate Ella Mason to a level she would be unable to achieve on her own, placing her within an idealized construction of southern identity. Given her dependence upon her cousins, it is not wholly surprising that Ella Mason’s feelings toward them often challenge the boundaries of familial affection: she guilelessly acknowledges that throughout her adolescence, she “was in love with both of them” (51). Tellingly, however, in her recurring fantasy, in which one cousin is her brother and the other is her brother’s eligible best friend, she does not consistently identify either Ben or Eric as the object of her romantic affection. Instead, she suggests that either man would be suitable as a brother or as a husband-figure. In fact, she once writes an impassioned love letter to one of her cousins, but later cannot recall whether she has addressed it to Ben or to Eric. The lack of specificity in Ella Mason’s romantic fantasies reveals that she is as enamored with the idea that their tightly knit circle will remain intact if she is with either Ben or Eric; in wishing that “we could go on forever,” she does not imagine a single union but a sense of collective communion and, consequently, a secure position in the world (51). Ella Mason’s enthusiasm for their trip to Europe, then, transcends the predictable excitement experienced by a young woman planning her first trip abroad; in addition to offering an opportunity for new experiences, the trip suggests a means of strengthening her connection to her childhood home by allowing her to solidify her relationship to her cousins, a bond that she fears may be dissolving. In one of the many flashbacks characteristic of Ella Mason’s circuitous narrative, she reveals that the months before their departure are marked by an unspecified anxiety: I knew some unstated tension was mounting, bringing obscure moments with it. We turned to one another but did not speak readily about anything. I had thought I was the only one, sensitive to something imagined—having “vapors,” as somebody called it—but I could tell we were all at a loss for some reason none of us knew . . . In the silence so suddenly fallen, something was ticking. Maybe, I thought, they just don’t like Martinsville anymore. They always said the parties were dull and squirmed out of them when they could. I lay awake thinking, They’ll move on soon; I won’t see them again.

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It was the next morning Eric called and we all grasped for Europe like the drowning, clinging to what we could. (53–54)

Ella Mason’s thoughts here are particularly illuminating; her narrative tends to idealize the group’s relationship, and, as a result, any exploration of the ways in which she, Ben, and Eric experience unease within their seemingly fixed positions is often as fleeting and elusive as Ella Mason’s “vapors.” While Ben’s and Eric’s uncertainties remain uninterrogated here, the source of Ella Mason’s anxiety is clear: she is fearful that her cousins will leave Martinsville, forever disrupting her sense of self, and thus even the suggestion of Ben and Eric’s restlessness introduces an uncomfortable glimpse of the unhomely for Ella Mason. She is eager to go on the trip, then, not necessarily to see Europe, but to remain home: if Eric and Ben travel abroad, Martinsville will be evacuated of the power of home—and will, perhaps, even become foreign—while Europe will be invested with it. The “unstated tension” and “obscure moments” do not fully disappear once the group has embarked, however. While Eric and Ben claim their inevitable roles as the group’s unofficial docents and Jamie, Mayfred, and Ella Mason act as their earnest students, there is an almost imperceptible shift within the group’s structure. At odd moments during their trip they are suddenly confronted by the wave of uncertainty that Ella Mason still cannot name; she knows only that “the ticking of something hidden among us” continues to exist (54).9 Thirty years later, Ella Mason meets with Eric and he confirms that part of this “hidden thing” is indeed tied to “unhoming” Ella Mason: he tells her, “The trip in the first place . . . it had to do with you partly. Maybe you didn’t understand that. We were outward bound, leaving you, a sister in some sense. We’d talked about it” (60). Yet if Ella Mason is not able to “understand” that she is being abandoned, she certainly is able to sense it; it is this anxiety about the potential destabilization of home that haunts Ella Mason and compels her to have an affair with Eric when the two are alone in Florence for a few days. Certainly, her attraction to her cousins has been established, and so this move is not altogether unexpected; yet we also see Ella Mason quite literally embracing “Eros and Agape” in an attempt to “cling to what we could” and thus stave off the looming uncertainty of destabilization. The affair with Eric ultimately does not function as a simple resolution of Ella Mason’s anxiety, however. Even during their days in Florence, she is haunted by memories of home. In one example, she

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and Eric sit in a café one afternoon, playing a game in which they name Italian artists in alphabetical order. Stumped by the letter L, she proffers “Lumbago,” and they laugh at her failure, which marks her as “[w]orse than Jamie.” She concludes, only somewhat ruefully, “We were always going home again” (61). Ella Mason recognizes on some level that the fantasy of home that she creates with Eric through their affair is merely illusory, and she does not achieve a genuine sense of rootedness. In fact, their affair ends immediately upon their arrival in the United States, where Ella Mason finds herself confronted by the same uncertainties that she had attempted to flee by going to Europe. She explains that after her return she pines for Eric, but we quickly see that her longing is not specific, but rather a more generalized yearning for a secure home: she states, “I kept wanting Eric, wanting my old dream: my brilliant cousins, princely, cavalier” (66). Ella Mason’s use of the word “cousins” here rather than “cousin” exposes her need for the identity her cousins grant her rather than the desire for the continuation of her relationship with Eric. However, Ella Mason’s narrative also reveals that Eric’s motivation for pursuing a sexual relationship with her originates in his own sense of being unhomed. While Ella Mason continues to see him as a model of southern masculinity, in fact Eric is rapidly losing his ability to maintain his “princely and cavalier” status. Whereas Ben seems to follow the scripted role of the southern gentleman with ease—he is excelling in his graduate program and is dating a woman who is both cultivated and wealthy—Eric is flunking out of law school, a failure that is unacceptable for someone of his “class or connection” (64). Thus, as he and Ben plan the trip to Europe in part as a consolation for Ella Mason, a “sister” who is to be abandoned by her “outwardly bound brothers,” he also sees the trip as a way to continue in his role as the accomplished young southern intellectual without interruption. Like Ella Mason, then, Eric sees Europe as a stage upon which the values and identities of home can be performed. Just as she seeks to reify her place within the cousins’ coterie and thus reassure herself of an existing identity, Eric attempts to deny the sense of dislocation that will surely be triggered by his failure as a law student, and, by extension, as a southern man. For Ben, Jamie, Mayfred, and, to an extent, Ella Mason, Europe does indeed function as a means of solidifying, and even intensifying, their existing identities. Ella Mason notes, “We were in a Renaissance of ourselves,” explaining that Jamie is maturing with unexpected grace, Mayfred is fully embodying the ideals associated with the southern belle, Ben is growing more comfortable in his intellectual

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“dominance,” and she is growing more confident of her “presence” (58). They are not becoming more European per se, but instead are more certain of the identities that they adopt at home. Only Eric, Ella Mason suggests, seems incomplete in his transformation. She chooses to read his brooding silence, triggered in actuality by his apprehension about his performance on his law exams, as studied irony, a marker of his cavalier status. It is for this reason, perhaps, that she cannot interpret his advances as an attempt to fully inhabit this role; by situating Ella Mason as an exemplar of southern womanhood, rather than a fawning sister-figure, Eric is able to locate himself within the paradigm of southern manhood and to stave off the unhomeliness—that “ticking of something hidden”—that threatens him. When Eric finally gets the letter from Emory confirming his failure and expelling him from the program, he can no longer deny his situation, however. He and Ella Mason have rejoined the group in Rome, yet Eric seeks self-imposed exile in a separate hotel room to consider his position; this remove also represents the disorientation to which he has surrendered. Ella Mason tracks him down with the help of a porter, noting that she would have been unable to find him herself in the “labyrinth” of a hotel: “Italian buildings, I know now, are constructed like dreams. There are passages departing from central hallways, stairs that twist back upon themselves, dark silent doors” (63). The room that Eric has rented is just as bewildering as the hotel itself. Ella Mason identifies it as a “curious room” that is rarely assigned to guests, explaining that The shutters outside were closed on something that suggested more of a courtyard than the outside, as no streak or glimmer of light came through . . . There were brass sconces set ornamentally around the moldings, looking down, cupids and fauns and smiling goat faces, with bulbs concealed in them, though the only light came from one dim lamp on the bedside table. There were heavy, dark engravings of Rome . . . the avenues, the monuments, the river. And one panel of small pictures in a series showed some familiar scenes in Florence. (64–65)

In retreating from the others, then, Eric has also embraced the spatial dislocation that typifies the unhomely moment. While he spends the early part of the trip leading the group through European cities, interpreting sights for them, he is now entrenched in a hotel that is labyrinthine and ensconced in a room that is equally disorienting: it is filled not only with light fixtures that do not provide light—they are, instead, empty “myth faces,” in Ella Mason’s words—but it is

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decorated with a series of prints that function as misleading maps, shadowy depictions of the city he inhabits and “familiar” images of a city he has departed (65). His hotel room is a perfect articulation of Bhabha’s “world-in-the-home,” an almost unfathomable collage of images that challenges Eric’s ability to place himself in any meaningful schema. For the remainder of the trip, Eric wrestles with his uncertain position. Ben, who has learned of Eric’s failure, tries to convince Eric that while he momentarily may have wandered off course, he will eventually return “home”: in a heated conversation that Ella Mason overhears only in snippets, Ben passionately argues, “What you feel about it, that’s not what matters. There’s a right way of looking at it” (69). While Eric angrily rejects Ben’s insistence upon an absolute, or “right,” set of behaviors, his longing for the certainty that Ben speaks of is evident when he breaks off his relationship with Ella Mason, telling her, “It’s got to stop now; I’ve got to find some shape to things. There was promise, promises. You’ve got to see we’re saying they’re worthless, that nothing matters” (70). Eric’s pronouncement is meant to be an explanation of why his relationship with Ella Mason cannot work, but, instead, it reveals his confusion about the obligations of southern manhood. The “promises” he speaks of refer not so much to the familial bonds that he and Ella Mason have broken as to his commitment to his own “promise.” Although he has told Ben that his expulsion from law school is “not important,” and that he will never accept the conventional boundaries of home that Ben insists he respect, Eric is not comfortable in the disorientating haze of academic, familial, and social free-fall (69). He finds himself trapped: he is no longer defined by the values of home that Ben espouses, but, unlike Callie, who in the closing pages of “Jean-Pierre” is able to embrace an ever-evolving construction of home, Eric is still desperate to “find some shape to things” and to identify something that “matters.” Unlike “Jean-Pierre,” “The Cousins” does not conclude with an overtly ambiguous ending, but despite its more straightforward structure, the story is also unlike “Jack of Diamonds” in that it refuses to provide a clear resolution to Ella Mason’s and Eric’s feelings of spiritual displacement. The two major threads of the story come together in its final pages: we are provided both with an account of the final leg of the trip and with a concluding glimpse into Ella Mason’s visit to Eric thirty years after the trip has occurred. Both of these scenarios are linked by a sense of finality: the trip—and, consequently, Ella Mason and Eric’s affair—is winding down, and, decades later, the

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“restlessness” that has haunted Ella Mason is alleviated by her reunion with Eric. Yet, more compellingly, these twin conclusions are united by their shared, uncertain meditation on unhomeliness (29). On the train ride from New York to Chattanooga, Mayfred surprises the group by announcing that she has memorized “Ulalume,” the poem that functions as the central focus of Ben’s thesis on “The Lost Ladies of Edgar Allan Poe.” Just as Dickinson’s poetry operates as a guiding text within “Jean-Pierre,” “Ulalume” functions as an important coda in “The Cousins”: the poem serves as a sly nod to Poe’s own incestuous marriage to his first cousin, Virginia Clemm, as well as a more obvious tribute to the most famous of Poe’s “lost ladies.” By reciting it, Mayfred not only invokes the notion of being “lost,” but she undercuts some of Ben’s authority by proving that she, too, is capable of mastering Poe’s work. Ben’s conspicuous irritation at her flawless recitation of the poem—he storms out of the train’s compartment—reveals that he finds the performance threatening rather than flattering; Mayfred’s “party trick” challenges his acknowledged status. Thus, “Ulalume” is not only suggestive of the displacement that Ella Mason and Eric have experienced, but it functions as an ambivalent critique of the strict construction of home that Ben represents. This ambivalence is echoed when Ella Mason visits Eric in his home in Florence thirty years later. Like Ella Mason, Eric has enjoyed success: she notes that his apartment, which is well-furnished, has a view of the river, and is adorned with a photograph of a beautiful woman, is evidence that he has “done well” (32). Yet, despite the comfortable appearance of his home, when Ella Mason tells Eric that Ben has recently suggested that she is the reason that they have lost him, Eric only gently protests his identification as lost (38). Certainly, he is not at home: he is literally living outside the South—indeed, outside the United States—and, in a larger sense, he confesses that he had been “undecided about everything” for many years after “that law school thing” (66–67). Their conversation takes a surprising turn, however, when Eric engages in a long reminiscence of one of their planning sessions for the trip to Europe. Despite the fact that more than thirty years have passed in the interim, he is able to conjure up minute details about the evening, and he wistfully recalls, “I was sitting back in the corner, watching, and I felt, If I live to be a thousand, I’ll never feel more love than I do this minute. Love of these, my blood, and this place here” (68). Ella Mason seems surprised by his reverie and replies, “But you’re not there . . . You’re here,” and Eric only agrees (68). In this exchange, Eric suggests that, despite his love of his early home, he cannot risk experiencing the trauma of

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unhomeliness that he associates with the South. He has thus chosen to create a new home, one that does not provide him with the sense of security that he experienced on the evening he describes to Ella Mason, but one that also does not have the power to unsettle him so completely. Through spiritual and physical migrancy, then, Eric wards off the terrors of the unhomely. In this way, both Ella Mason and Eric bear the scars of unhomeliness. While Ella Mason has married two men, neither of whom resembles her cousins, she still finds herself haunted by her memories of her relationship with Eric. Thus, while she has been able to define herself in their absence, Ella Mason still uses her cousins as an important imaginative touchstone in her understanding of home. She seeks out Eric as a means of “freeing” herself from a feeling of “restlessness”; even after thirty years apart, she believes that he can provide her with a sense of rootedness (30). Eric, on the other hand, has abandoned all conventional notions of home. Unsettled by his failure to conform to the model of aristocratic, white masculine authority, he has suffered the trauma of cultural displacement; by seeking geographical displacement, he attempts to avoid confrontations that may reignite his spiritual displacement. Thus, as Eric and Ella Mason sit together in the story’s final image, it is significant that they find peace in the “pitch black dark” (72). The darkness temporarily renders their dislocation invisible; time and place become meaningless in the blackness that surrounds them. Unlike Callie and Rosalind, then, there is little suggestion that Eric and Ella Mason may “emancipate” themselves from their uncertain state; instead, they merely are granted a temporary reprieve from the unhomeliness that has haunted them. *

* *

“The Skater,” the final story in the collection, differs from the stories that precede it in Jack of Diamonds in that its protagonist, Sara Mangham, never fully comes to terms with the her sense of dislocation. In part, Sara is able to engage in such denial because of the stability of her position: she is a wealthy housewife living in a suburb of Montreal who seems to have everything to ensure her happiness. In fact, however, Sara finds herself despondent after her three children grow up and leave the house. Despite the fact that she views herself as largely unchanged—she earnestly insists that she is still attached to “the silly way [I] used to be” before the responsibilities of motherhood—Sara is, in fact, lost without her children (169). Long after they have grown, she finds herself chasing after children who

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resemble them in some way, hoping to quite literally “catch” the past and, consequently, to reaffirm her own identity as a mother. In addition, despite her long and largely happy marriage to Ted, a successful attorney, Sara pursues an affair with Karl Darcas, a man who is much younger than she is, closer, in fact, to her children’s age than to her own. Yet even as she chastises herself for running after strange children and wonders about the significance of her affair, she is unwilling to consider her behavior fully, content instead to accept the comfort it offers her. Sara’s situation is thrown into relief when she meets Goss McIvor, an “intense [and] troubled” young man who is a client of Ted’s (167). Goss’s case is an odd one: he is in possession of his father’s will, in which he has been bequeathed his father’s estate, including the mansion where his father resided until his death. The legacy is important to Goss not only in that it represents a huge windfall, but because it is a substantiation of his father’s love for him; Goss and his father have been estranged, and the mansion, which is at the heart of the will, suggests the possibility of a spiritual homecoming for Goss as well as offering him a physical home. Goss’s claim to his inheritance is being contested, however, by a psychic group who are in possession of an alternate will that leaves the mansion to them. The absurdity of the situation is not lost on Sara, yet, despite the case’s essential unsavoriness and Goss’s awkwardness, she finds herself drawn to him, believing that “the boy’s real need was not for any will but for caring, making contact” (168). Sara rather predictably steps in as a mother-figure for Goss, then, but he also functions as an unexpected double for her. He is, certainly, unlike Sara in his physical or social stature: while Sara is “handsome and acceptable,” Goss is red-headed and is marked by “long, spiraling scars” on his face and neck; moreover, he is often ill at ease and, at times, inappropriately aggressive (169, 168). Yet, Sara is more like Goss than she would acknowledge: she is bruised from Karl’s kisses, and this “precious sore[ness]” speaks to the pain that has driven her to the affair, just as Goss’s scars are signs of his private suffering (166). And while Sara does not display any signs of Goss’s awkwardness, she is able to sympathize with the extreme anxiety that often drives his missteps. For instance, when he tries to blackmail her into helping him by suggesting that he knows she is having an affair, she dismisses him casually, stating, “You’re not going to throw away the only person who really wants to help you”; she is not angered by his attempt to bully her, but rather recognizes it as a cry for help not unlike the affair he threatens to expose (177).

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Thus, Sara’s attachment to Goss is not merely the result of her desire to adopt a surrogate son who will allow her to exercise her maternal instinct; instead, she recognizes an unexpected sympathy between them. Sara’s recognition of Goss as a “lost soul,” not unlike herself, becomes even more apparent when he reveals the extent of his dislocation, which is articulated through his appropriation of a fully disembodied persona. Before Phil McIvor, Goss’ father, died, Goss had become a “ghost” in his house: Phil had disapproved of Goss’s inability to keep a job that Phil had secured for him and had thrown him out. Having no place to go, Goss lived clandestinely in the attic, emerging only at night to steal food from the kitchen. Phil and his servants are terrified by the evidence of Goss’s haunting—“missing food, doors ajar, God knows what”—and thus, ironically, it is Goss who inspires his father’s reliance on the psychics, whom he enlists to solve the mysterious occurrences (175). After Phil’s death, Goss is desperate to believe that his father has forgiven him for his failures; by leaving the house to Goss, rather than the psychic group, Phil would relieve Goss of his “ghostly” status. The bequest of the mansion, then, has the power to resolve Goss’s anxiety about his estrangement from his father and to allow him to locate himself in relation to his past. Sara is so caught up in Goss’s predicament that, in a move that is both daring and reckless, she joins the psychic group to spy on them and to see if she can locate their copy of the will. When she has ascertained that they keep the document in a display case, she tells Karl, who devises a ruse and successfully steals it. Sara realizes that her decision to involve herself so closely in Ted’s case is not only illegal but irresponsible, and she realizes, “If such conniving became known, her own life might well be downgraded forever by people she had always lived among, or, like something useless, thrown out” (180). The fact that she is willing to risk her own social expulsion to ensure Goss’s security is, in many ways, incomprehensible. Yet, in engaging herself in Goss’s unhomely condition—and even hazarding ostracism to do so—Sara is able to approach the terrors of dislocation tangentially; her “risk,” then, is far less than it might be if she questioned her own sense of connection to home more closely. Yet Sara’s sympathy for Goss ultimately forces her to recognize their affinity: when Sara and Karl are burning the psychics’ will, thereby ensuring Goss’s recovery of the mansion, Sara’s experiences an epiphanic moment in which she comprehends the depth of her own disorientation. As she thinks of being discovered—revealed to be interfering with the McIvor will or cheating on her husband—she sees her situation in distinctly spatial terms: “She walked to the edge of

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that possibility and took one dizzy look downward. Was even falling as hard as leaving this room?” (180). By equating “falling”—losing her fixed place in her community—with “leaving this room”—or breaking off her relationship—Sara temporarily comes to terms with the ways in which her recent decisions speak to the larger ways in which she has become unsettled. She is as desperate for a fixed home as Goss is; in chasing phantom versions of her children and having an affair with Karl Darcas, who reminds her of her younger self, then, she is “haunting” the home that she feels she has lost. Yet, Sara only allows herself to briefly experience the “intricate invasion” of her domestic space, and she never approaches true “emancipation” from her essential unhomeliness (Bhabha 9, 16). Thus, while Goss is “rehomed” through Sara and Karl’s intervention, Sara’s construction of home remains ambiguous. Indeed, as Goss takes possession of the mansion, her affair with Karl has ended and her need for her children seems diminished. Before the end of the affair, Karl is out of town briefly and Sara is able to “[fight] off the impulse to get out the children’s toys [and] she did not even look through their old pictures” (177). Yet, while these moves suggest that Sara is acknowledging the shift in the boundaries that have functioned to define her identity since her children’s births, we do not see Sara acknowledging the power of these shifts. This fact is underscored by the final image of the story, that which lends it its title. Sara imagines herself as a child, skating in circles on a local ice rink. In some ways, the image suggests liberation; yet, in recognizing Sara as “the skater,” we must also see her as engaged in denial. As Robert Phillips notes, she is “skating on the surface of depths she barely comprehends,” or, perhaps, does not want to acknowledge; while Callie, Rosalind, and Ella Mason all find themselves staring into the chasm of the unhomely, Sara takes “one dizzy look downward” and opts to concern herself instead with smooth, if illusory, surfaces (203). Thus, we are left with the sense that Sara may still “break through the ice,” and that the unhomeliness she pushes away will continue to haunt her.

Bringing it All Back Home Again: The Unhomely Moment in “The Business Venture” Each of the four stories in Jack of Diamonds that is set outside the South, then, defies the conventional treatment of home that we associate with southern literature; the stories’ depiction of home as a space of “intervention”—a site of reinterpretation and transformation—rather

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than of reflexive self-fashioning challenges the image of the stable home that is a hallmark of most southern fiction. The fact that these stories are all set outside the South works, to some extent, to soften the impact of Spencer’s unconventional approach to home: we do not expect to see a traditional southern reverence of home in a work set in Montreal, for example. Yet, it is important to note that this work goes beyond the relatively tentative questioning of home that marks Spencer’s first foray outside the South, The Light in the Piazza; instead, these four stories employ the unhomely moment to probe the broad assumptions that inform her characters’ understanding of home in new ways. The collection is bound together, then, by the fact that all of these stories’ protagonists—Callie, Rosalind, Ella Mason, and Sara—become aware of what Bhabha identifies as “the world-inthe-home,” an invasion of their domestic space that triggers spiritual disorientation and that, ideally, can bring about a new, more holistic, view of home. The one exception to this paradigm, interestingly enough, seems to be “The Business Venture,” the penultimate story in the collection and the only one that is set solely in the South. “The Business Venture” does not attempt to link itself to the larger world suggested by the other stories in Jack of Diamonds but instead is set in the small town of Tyler, Mississippi. In many ways, the story seems to be a return to Spencer’s earlier themes: it chronicles the attempts of Nelle Townshend to open a dry-cleaning business with a black man, Robin Byers. When the operation is revealed to be the result of an equal partnership between Nelle and Robin, the people of Tyler become uncomfortable, and after much gossiping and public fretting, they attempt to shut the business down. Thus, on its surface, “The Business Venture” exists in the mode of The Voice at the Back Door, a chronicle of southern bigotry and fear that positions it within what Fred Hobson has identified as “the school of shame,” writers who “[acknowledge] the darkness in the Southern past” and, often, its present (Tell About the South 11). Yet, when we consider the story in the context of the anxiety of displacement that defines the rest of Jack of Diamonds, we see that “The Business Venture” is not merely a critique of southern racism, but an exploration of the ways in which the provincialism that fuels that racism is a desperate attempt to stave off feelings of unhomeliness. By viewing “The Business Venture” in relation to the collection’s non-southern stories, then, we may read the story as rejecting, rather than merely condemning, the fixed boundaries of southern identity, and demonstrating that the same interstitial

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gaps that shape identity outside the South are also evident in even the strictest constructions of the southern home. The story’s narrator, Eileen Waybridge, recalls Ella Mason in her conversational and often circular method of story-telling.10 Yet, unlike Ella Mason, whose reminiscence is a means of reevaluating her relationship with her cousins, Eileen often eschews self-reflection and buries her narrative in a sense of collective identity. Eileen is part of a group of close-knit friends who have known one another since they were children, and, despite their various couplings, break-ups, and marriages, they continue to identify themselves in terms of their group identity. She explains, It sometimes seemed to me, in considering the crowd we were always part of, from even before we went to school, straight on through, that we were like one person, walking around different ways, but in some permanent way breathing together, feeling the same reactions, thinking each other’s thoughts. What do you call that if not love? If asked, we’d all cry Yes! with one voice, but then it’s not our habit to ask anything serious. We’re close to religious about keeping everything light and gay. (127)

In relating the story of Nelle and Robin, then, Eileen attempts to honor the group’s common identity, even when her own views are more liberal than those of her friends, and to keep a deliberate sense of “lightness and gaiety” in her narrative, even when this approach seems inconsistent with her experience. Thus, Eileen’s need for the security provided by her friends is evident throughout her narrative, even when she does not overtly allude to it, and her dependence upon this group and the sense of home created by their “love” becomes one of the tacit themes of the story. This is illustrated in the group’s complex reaction to Nelle Townshend’s decision to open a dry-cleaning business. Nelle longs to be an art historian, but because she must live with and care for her mother in Tyler, she decides to try her hand at an entrepreneurial project that will allow her to work from home. When she meets Robin, who has used the educational benefits provided to Vietnam veterans to train as a dry cleaner, she decides to transform a wing of her mother’s stately house into a dry-cleaning operation. This move alone raises some eyebrows in Tyler as the Townshends are among the oldest families in the town, and Eileen explains that they “were the sort to keep everything just the way it was” (122). In fact, because of this consistency, Eileen associates the Townshend house with home as

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much as she does her own house: “When away and thinking of home, I see right off the Townshend yard and the elephant ears [planted there]” (122). Yet, even though Nelle’s unconventional decision to go into business for herself challenges “the way things are” and literally and symbolically transforms the Townshend home, the group is relatively supportive of her move because they suspect that it will make her more accessible. Grey Houston, who had once dated Nelle, explains that she never entirely “fit in with us . . . Y’all never did relax. You never felt easy . . . She was too serious” (120). They seem to suspect that Nelle’s new position in the community will align her more fully with the group; as a drycleaner, rather than simply a Townshend, she may be more willing to join the “one voice” that they believe they share. However, as Nelle dedicates herself to the business, the group finds that she is growing more distant from them, and they perceive this increased remoteness as triggered by Nelle’s partnership with Robin. As a rule, Eileen explains, “[W]e—the we I’m always speaking ofdecided not to talk about race relations because it spoiled things too much” (135–36). Yet, despite their denial of the “Negro question,” as Eileen identifies it, race is central to the group’s self-imagining; just as the group seems to require constant reassurance of their shared position, they rely on a common understanding of the larger hierarchy in which they are participating (135). Thus, Rose Houston, another member of Eileen’s circle, professes liberalism but “jokes,” “But wouldn’t it be just wonderful . . . to have a little colored gal to pick up your handkerchief and sew on your buttons and bring you cold lemonade and fan you when you’re hot, and just love you to death?” (135). It is this love that Eileen sees as central to their understanding of race relations, and their faith in this devotion is what allows them to “rest easy”; the group finds that they can dismiss the Negro question through their insistence that social imbalances are negated by African Americans’ presumed affection for whites who do not see themselves as actively engaged in racial bigotry (135). Yet Nelle’s relationship with Robin challenges the group’s understanding of race in Tyler. As Eileen is the first to notice, Robin “was a real partner with Nelle, not just her hired help,” and while Eileen claims to feel “a mellowness in my heart” about their collaboration, she knows that the rest of the group will be threatened by it: Nelle and Robin’s relationship suggests an alternate model for race relations in Tyler (130, 131). Thus, the town’s reaction to Nelle and Robin’s relationship is relatively predictable. While Nelle hides the fact that she and Robin

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are legally partners in the business, she and Robin often “slip” and appear in public as equals: Robin is seen sitting in the front seat of her car as they make dry-cleaning deliveries together; Nelle is spotted going to Robin’s house at night; and, most damning, Nelle once unthinkingly uses the term “we” when speaking about herself and Robin, a we that contradicts the we that Eileen regularly invokes. The town of Tyler, and Eileen’s group of friends in particular, see this relationship not only as a violation of the status quo, but interpret Nelle and Robin’s familiarity as a sign of that their relationship is sexual as well, the cardinal southern taboo. The exact nature of their relationship is never revealed—we know only that they share a bond “of the sort that lovers feel”—but, invariably, the extent of their relationship is irrelevant (147). Even as late as 1976, when “The Business Venture” is set, black sexuality, whether fully materialized or merely suggested, is seen as threatening to the ideal of white womanhood, and, consequently, white masculinity.11 It is particularly significant then, that very little of the group’s anger is directed toward Robin, as might be expected. Instead, the group sees Nelle’s relationship with Robin as part of a larger betrayal. As Pete Owens, another member of Eileen’s circle, explains, “ ‘Nelle’s gotten too independent is the thing . . . She thinks she can live her own life’ ” (129). Pete speaks to the group’s shared anxiety about any challenge to their understanding of home and their fixed place within it; by attempting to live “her own life,” including choosing a black man as a business partner, Nelle is indirectly rejecting the “life” that has been embraced by her group of friends. Even Eileen, who is the most tolerant of Nelle’s choices, thinks to herself that “We felt weakened because of her. What did she think she was doing?” (127). Moreover, Eileen is relatively unsympathetic to the anger that Nelle has inspired in her friends: It still upsets me to think of all the gossip that went on that year [about Robin and Nelle’s relationship], and at the same time I have to blame Nelle Townshend for it, not so much for starting it, but for being so unconscious about it. She had stepped out of line and she didn’t even bother to notice. (128)

Thus, it is Nelle, not Robin, who is deemed most threatening to Eileen’s circle of friends, and Nelle’s refusal to acknowledge their construction of home, one that is dependent upon an established hierarchy, becomes a point of preoccupation. As Eileen soon realizes however, the home that she envisions as based on a simple set of hierarchies—“we” and “them,” white and

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black—is much more complex than she has allowed. Like the other protagonists in Jack of Diamonds, she must come to terms with the fact that the home she has identified as inviolable is in fact marked by the same sort of interstitial gaps that are associated with more loosely circumscribed, non-southern construction of home. Interestingly, Eileen is unhomed not by Nelle’s relationship with Robin, though, but by Nelle’s re-admittance into “the group”; the unhomely moment is triggered for Eileen at a party that is thrown for Nelle by Pete and Hope Owens after Nelle has successfully fought the injunction against her dry-cleaning business (an injunction, of course, that originated within this group.) The party is designed to ease the group’s tension; by welcoming Nelle back into the fold, Hope intends to encourage “everybody to start acting normal again” (147). While Hope’s gesture is sincere, it is telling that this “normalcy” is further illustrated by Hope’s decision to “[get] a nice little colored girl, Perline, dressed up in black with a white ruffled apron” to help her serve her guests; thus Nelle’s “homecoming” is also marked by a pointed reinforcement of the boundaries that she has dismissed (149). The party does not function as planned, however, when Eileen’s husband, Charlie, shows up drunk and leaves with Nelle. Charlie is, as Eileen acknowledges, a womanizer. At times, Eileen takes pride in his identity as “big and gleaming, the all-over male” (120). More often, however, she is humiliated by his flirtations with other women and is hurt by his meager attempts to cover up his affairs. Charlie’s dalliances are an open secret in town, and Eileen protects herself against the pain they cause by employing a skewed logic that incorporates them into her notion of home. Eileen tells herself, “[O]ne thing I personally know that is not true is that Charlie Waybridge has had one woman. Looked at that way, it can be a comfort, one thing to be sure of” (121). Thus, just as Marilee Summerall finds comfort in Foster Hamilton’s continued drinking in “A Southern Landscape,” Eileen incorporates Charlie’s infidelities into a “permanent landscape of the heart,” finding security in Charlie’s habitual waywardness; his womanizing becomes merely another benchmark of identity (“A Southern Landscape” 52). However, when Charlie has an affair with Nelle (whom he had dated prior to his marriage to Eileen) Eileen finds that she cannot “be sure of” anything anymore. Charlie’s transgression does not follow his customary pattern of seeking instant gratification; rather, Eileen believes that his attraction to Nelle represents a “total reevaluation” of their marriage (156). Thus, in his affair with Nelle, Charlie has violated all of the boundaries that define the rigid home in which Eileen locates herself. His dedication to Nelle breaches Eileen’s

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understanding of his infidelities, and his acceptance of Nelle in spite of—or perhaps because of—her relationship with Robin defies the group’s instance on distancing itself from “the Negro question.” In his pursuit of Nelle, then, Charlie has abandoned the notion of home that Eileen views as sacred.12 Like the protagonists of the other stories in Jack of Diamonds, Eileen finds herself cast into the world suggested by interstitial intimacy, in which the binaries she relies upon—including that of black and white—become meaningless. The seeming impossibility of this violation of home inspires her to drink, and, when this does not anesthetize her, Eileen runs off with Grey Houston for a weekend in Jackson, Mississippi, a type of social incest that aligns her with Ella Mason. In short, Eileen attempts to embrace her confusion, although she ultimately returns home, unsuccessful. Yet the home she returns to also provides little comfort, and, instead, is marked by the spatial disorientation that is associated with unhomeliness. Upon her return from her impulsive trip to Jackson, she explains, The world is spinning now and I am spinning along with it. It doesn’t stand still anymore to the stillness inside that murmurs to me, I know my love and I belong to my love when all is said and done, down through foreverness and into eternity. No, when I got back I was just part of it all, ordinary, a twenty-eight-year-old attractive married woman with family and friends and a nice house in Tyler, Mississippi. But with nothing absolute. (156)

The “spinning” that Eileen experiences, then, represents the same sort of bewilderment experienced by Spencer’s protagonists who are either not southern—Callie, Rosalind, and Sara—or are temporarily displaced from the South—Ella Mason. In this way, Eileen’s sense that she possesses “nothing absolute” represents a challenge to traditional constructions of southern identity. Prior to Nelle’s partnership with Robin and Charlie’s affair with Nelle, “family and friends and a nice house in Tyler, Mississippi” were all that Eileen required to assure herself of her place in the world. Now they represent hollow landmarks in a landscape in which she cannot locate herself. After her return, Eileen tries to recreate the home she has lost, but the task proves impossible. She visits Nelle and finds solace in the fact that the Townshends display a framed picture of her grandfather with Nelle’s father; the photograph speaks to a shared history, the common identity in which she has lost faith. However, while she

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acknowledges, “I had a better feeling when I left [the Townshends’ house],” she wonders, “Would it last? Could I get it past the elephant ears?” (158). The elephant ears, which she had once imagined as emblematic of a secure home, are no longer absolute in their symbolism, but instead are associated with emotions that are both insubstantial and temporary. Significantly, Eileen’s last attempt to relocate herself takes place during a spontaneous encounter with Robin. When she sees him making a delivery, she finds herself channeling her friends’ voices when she says, “[Y]ou got to leave here, Robin. You’re tempting fate, every day” (159). Eileen is shocked by the warning she delivers, but she also believes that their exchange is so commonplace that it is utterly without meaning: “When we passed each other, it was like erasing what we’d said and that we’d ever met” (159). They have fallen into roles that may date “from a thousand years back,” yet Eileen cannot find comfort in their inevitability. She concludes only by noting, “I think we were all hanging by a golden thread, but who has got the other end? Dreaming or awake, I’m praying it will hold us all suspended” (159). Eileen’s final musing is fraught with meaning: it evokes Eudora Welty’s identification of “a sense of place” as “ball of golden thread to carry us there and back and in every sense of the word to bring us home” (“Place in Fiction” 129). Yet, in contrast to Welty’s metaphor, the thread here has unraveled fully, and we see that “place” is a fragile construction: Eileen has been carried “there,” but cannot come home again in any but the most literal sense. Thus, Jack of Diamonds represents an important break with Spencer’s earlier work, notable for its veneration of the southern home, yet the collection also speaks to the difficulties inherent in her struggle to adopt what she has called a “non-Southern views of things.” Indeed, Spencer never truly abandons the South: each of Jack of Diamonds’ stories, whether it is set in the South or not, probes the notion of home, the central preoccupation of her most “southern” fiction. Yet, Jack of Diamonds does reveal a new, fairly radical approach to home. Taken as a whole, the stories do not merely question some of the assumptions that inform home, a subversive tactic long recognized as a component of southern women’s writing, but actually challenge the notion of a stable home itself. Each of the stories’ protagonists is left shaken by what Homi Bhabha has termed a “domestic invasion,” a sudden recognition of the larger world that results in bewilderment and disorientation. As a result, Spencer’s protagonists are forced to confront—if not fully

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come to terms with—the essential instability of their previously comfortable (and comforting) notion of home. This collection proposes, then, that the terms that have defined home themselves may be artificial and suggests that home may be re-envisioned as a space that exists outside of traditional boundaries. In this way, Jack of Diamonds expands on the project that Spencer has initiated in The Light in the Piazza: while she cannot fully discard the traditional southern vocabulary of home, by adopting the rhetoric of unhomeliness, she is able to contest the fixed constructions of identity long associated with the southern home and to open up our thinking about the South.

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CH A P T ER

4

“Radical” Re-Envisionings of Home: The Night Travellers

In 1986, after more than thirty years abroad, Elizabeth Spencer returned to the South. She has explained in her memoir and interviews that the move was triggered in large part by her health; as Spencer approached her mid-60s, Montreal’s long winters were taking a measurable toll in the form of recurring bouts of pneumonia that left her physically weakened. As a result, when Louis Rubin, the southern scholar—and friend and admirer of Spencer’s—arranged for a teaching contract at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Spencer and her husband, John Rusher, eagerly embraced the opportunity to move to a warmer environment. And, as Spencer notes in Landscapes of the Heart (1998), her decision to relocate to Chapel Hill ultimately was motivated by her recognition of a welcoming spiritual climate as much as it was prompted by more temperate weather. She explains, “After thirty-three years of displacement, the long road had turned a wanderer southward. I rejoiced to see that road was no longer mined and booby-trapped, but broad, smooth, and welcoming” (332). In fact, Spencer chooses to close her memoir with a description of this homecoming rather than to discuss the decade of work that follows it. In this way, the final chapter of Landscapes of the Heart, tellingly entitled “The Road Back,” provides a relatively tidy resolution to her narrative, suggesting not only a return to the South but a true reunion. Yet the rather effortless homecoming Spencer depicts in the closing pages of her memoir often is belied by her papers and interviews, which reveal her continuing ambivalence about the South.1 While the road home may not have been “mined and booby-trapped” by the cultural attitudes that had defined the South when Spencer first left Mississippi in the 1950s, many of the same personal and professional difficulties that had inspired her self-imposed “exile” still existed.

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Although her father, Luther, died ten years before she left Montreal, the will he ultimately left behind was the source of years of legal wrangling and emotional angst for Spencer.2 Thus, while she explains in Landscapes of the Heart that she was “delighted in finding [cousins estranged by time and distance] accessible to friendship” during her visits to Mississippi after her parents’ deaths, much of Spencer’s time at home was still dedicated to resolving the entanglements that had been orchestrated by her father (330). Moreover, Spencer continued to struggle to locate herself within the southern literary circles that had supported her in the early years of her career. In a June 6, 1985, letter to Walker Percy, a year before her move to Chapel Hill, Spencer uncharacteristically reveals her frustration with the literary establishment when she writes, “The Southern critics never pay me any mind except socially, and I should be used to it. For all my work, I might have been drowned at 6 months” (Percy Collection). Thus, even on the eve of her return, Spencer was aware of the ways in which the homes—both familial and literary—that she had abandoned decades earlier were still an uneasy fit. Spencer’s ambivalence toward the southern home is also evident in the remarks she made at a panel entitled “In and Out of the South” at the Southern Review conference at Louisiana State University in 1985. Spencer’s talk primarily focuses on the connection between place and language; yet, in a divergent thread, she also muses about the nature of expatriation, noting, I take exile to mean somebody chased you out; ex-patriate [sic] to mean you left because you didn’t want to stay. There are other words, like alien, alienation, separation, displaced person, or just plain absence. Alienation is something you can feel toward the people you live with, eat with, and talk to every day. In that sense you don’t have to go anywhere to feel cut-off, and so I suppose there is such a thing as “spiritual exile,” which you might, heaven help you, feel if you stayed right at home. But in this case, I guess you couldn’t really call it home. Far better then to go elsewhere, go North—Maine or Connecticut—and write “down home” fiction because then you might discover what home is. (ms. 4)

In this observation, Spencer does not acknowledge the nature of her own remove from the South, refusing to link her experience with any of the labels she has identified; yet, she suggests that despite the fact that her move to Canada “had all the indications of being a permanent one,” she cannot identify Montreal as a permanent home, nor, on the other hand, can she easily identify the South as a fixed home

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(ms. 1). Consequently, in her remarks Spencer finds herself wrestling with the rhetoric of displacement, and in her work as a whole, she is charged with the task of approaching the notion of home through a form of double expatriation that makes “discovering what home is” an intricate—and sustained—project. Thus, while Spencer’s move to North Carolina in 1986 put an end to the literal displacement that she spoke of at the Southern Review Conference, it did not wholly resolve the uncertain subject position she occupied as a repatriated southerner. Spencer did not respond to this ambiguity by writing “down home” fiction, however, but instead she continued to move away from the celebration of home that had marked her early work and to probe the notions of physical and spiritual alienation that had become the central preoccupation of much of her mature fiction. In fact, while The Night Travellers, published five years after Spencer’s return to the South, takes North Carolina as its initial setting, the novel is ultimately her most penetrating look at political, and cultural, and artistic migrancy to date. The novel focuses on the experiences of Mary Kerr Harbison, a young North Carolina woman who falls in love with, and later marries, Jefferson Blaise, an ambitious intellectual who is fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War. When Jeff rises in the antiwar movement’s ranks and finds himself on a number of government watch lists, Mary Kerr moves with him to Canada, where she soon finds herself alone with their child while Jeff undertakes a series of increasingly dangerous border-crossings. It is from this remove that she must negotiate a number of competing notions of home. In an immediate sense, then, The Night Travellers seems to revisit many of the themes of Spencer’s later work: the novel pits southern traditionalism against American progressivism and juxtaposes the intimacy of North Carolina life with the anonymity of Montreal. Yet, in choosing to set her work against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Spencer is able to create an entirely new locus of identity in her work. In contrast to her earliest work, in which the Civil War is still visible in the palimpsest of southern history, The Night Travellers looks to a period in which traditional identity is not being defended but rather is being exploded. Unlike the Civil War or the “good wars” that followed it—World Wars I and II—the Vietnam War did not reify notions of home, strengthening the boundaries between “Us” and “Them” and between good and evil, but rather clouded the American understanding of right and wrong and subsequently wreaked havoc on the notion of a coherent home. In choosing the tumultuous period of the Vietnam War as the setting for The Night Travellers, then, Spencer is able to comfortably

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adopt an indeterminate subjectivity, one that is neither explicitly “native” nor “expatriate,” and to use this ambiguous subject position to attempt to “discover what home is” and, consequently, to explore an increasingly complex notion of southern identity. Yet, despite the ways in which the murkiness of this period seems a particularly fertile space for the kind of deconstruction of home in which Spencer is engaged, her decision to locate her work in the Vietnam Era may be considered an unconventional one. As Sven Birkerts points out, “[w]hile there has been no shortage of documentary writing or flashily disturbing films, the war has, with few exceptions, scarcely touched our literature” (304). Writing in 1992, Birkerts contends that, on the whole, American writers have not yet come to terms with the trauma of the war.3 And if America has not yet carved out a space for Vietnam in its canon, certainly the South, which often is defined by its abhorrence of abstraction and is recognized for its adherence to a broad form of patriotism, may be even more reluctant to reflect on America’s involvement in Vietnam. In fact, Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel In Country is one of the few celebrated southern works that takes Vietnam as its focus, and, as Robert Brinkmeyer observes, the novel represents a turning away from distinctly southern concerns; he argues that Mason’s “focus is less on the Southern experience than on the American, and so for her a Southerner’s quest for self-definition may mean coming to terms with America and not the South, except as an expression of national experience” (32).4 A “southern” treatment of the Vietnam experience seems, then, not only unlikely but an impossibility. Yet, while southern identity may be subsumed by issues of American experience in any discussion of Vietnam, I contend that The Night Travellers is very much engaged in an exploration of the evolving southern home, even as it focuses on non-southern places. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues in a discussion of women poets in her study Writing Beyond the Ending (1985), the Vietnam War, more than any international conflict that predates it, demands a multivalent perspective; any writer who attempts to “interpret” the war must contend with the various slippages and paradoxes that continue to surround it. DuPlessis notes that the Vietnam War “demystified the colonialimperial relation,” but in doing so, it also asked all Americans to reconsider their role in a paradigm that had been, up until this point, largely invisible (128). As a result, DuPlessis argues, This swift delegitimization of a national mission made the process of critique especially sharp, a development that had, in turn, two

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intellectual effects on the generation to which these poets belonged: continual attention to the critical analysis of ideology on one hand, and, on the other hand, the spiritual hope for an ungridded area of human activity without ideology . . . These two effects are, of course, contradictory. (128)

DuPlessis contends here that the poets who wrote in the wake of the Vietnam War were charged both with undertaking a cultural critique and envisioning spaces in which that critique would not be relevant. Similarly, in choosing the Vietnam War as the backdrop for The Night Travellers, Spencer is engaged in a comparable, paradoxical enterprise: she is invited to evaluate southern and American ideologies while imagining an “ungridded area” within them—in essence, to consider a new construction of home that exists outside of the fractured homes she critiques. In short, by locating her southern characters within the social and political chaos produced by the Vietnam War, Spencer is able to interrogate the disruption of multiple forms of home, and, ultimately, to explore the possible transformation of home into a rejuvenative space.

Defining Boundaries: “The Home Scene” While The Night Travellers embarks on a particularly complex consideration of home and identity, then, the novel begins by locating itself within the recognizable boundaries of the southern home. Spencer signals to her readers that the Harbisons’ construction of home is a conventional one: the first section of the novel is entitled “The Home Scene,” a term that both evokes the supportive “domestic front” of World War II and implies a sense of unity. Furthermore, unlike the rest of the novel, which is fragmentary and employs a pastiche of voices and narrative techniques—many characters’ experiences are related through journal entries, letters, or even tape recordings—“The Home Scene” is depicted from a traditional, third-person limited-omniscient perspective, thus underscoring this sense of domestic conventionality through narrative normativity. And, rather predictably, the “scene” itself also confers a sense of stability: Mary Kerr is born and raised in Kingsbury, “a North Carolina city named for royalty and built on gold” (15). Her family is similarly well-grounded: Mary Kerr’s mother, the extraordinarily beautiful Kate McCanless Harbison, was raised on a farm, but “[h]er family knew in their bones that she would be something that wasn’t ordinary,” and her father, Donald Harbison, is an attorney who possesses “a grand name to have in Kingsbury” (15, 16).

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Yet, these signifiers belie a particularly troubled home, one that is marked by loss and emotional volatility. The novel’s first chapter, a two-page vignette, introduces the discord that defines the Harbsion home: in these pages, the young Mary Kerr has climbed out onto the family’s roof, searching for her pet kitten, Mopsy. The image is one that resonates in the novel for a number of reasons: first, while Mary Kerr’s position on the roof is somewhat precarious, it is also comfortable for her. We are told that “Mary Kerr felt wonderful out there alone. She tilted with the slant of the roof” (3). Thus, it is evident that even as a child, Mary Kerr is able to exist within the literal and metaphoric peripheries of the family home. More importantly, however, Mary Kerr’s presence on the roof also speaks to Kate Harbison’s conception of home. An aging southern belle, Kate sees home as a reflection of her impeccable taste and her carefully cultivated social status, and, despite her position as a researcher in a university lab, it is the Harbison home where Kate is able to demonstrate her power most clearly. Kate’s need to control all aspects of her home becomes obvious when Mary Kerr unconsciously acknowledges that her quest for Mopsy is hopeless: she suspects that Kate has destroyed the animal because it has scratched her good chairs. Even as a child, Mary Kerr understands Kate cannot cede authority, and an impulsive kitten who threatens Harbison furniture will be destroyed, despite Mary Kerr’s inevitable heartbreak. Kate’s absolute need for a tightly circumscribed home, one that seems in keeping with her position as a Harbison, becomes one of the central themes of “The Home Scene.” While Don Harbison fails to measure up to Kate’s image of a husband, both literally—“he was a little shorter, a little less heavyset than exactly what she had in mind”— and figuratively—despite his lineage, “he was no great shakes at business”—Kate is pleased with the position her marriage has secured for her, one that she links closely to the house that they have inherited (16). In fact, the house, which has been in the Harbsion family for generations, becomes central to her self-fashioning, and she sees her own beauty and power as linked to its physical structure: They got the Harbison house, a fine, Georgian-looking, two-story residence in an exclusive circle off Central Boulevard, where the streets grew lofty, fine, and full, looking down on other, distant trees whose names and kinship were unknown. A circular drive running up to the steps from the street was one of the very few in that area. Early in her marriage Kate Harbison heard some mention of Scott Fitzgerald, whom she then read. What happened between her and

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the pages set in Long Island, New York City, Paris, and the south of France cannot be known, and she did not often mention the books, but something shone for her out of them with no sign of going out, became a guiding star, an idea of how she, when she wasn’t doing her job, was going to be. (17)

Throughout the novel, Kate repeatedly associates herself with Fitzgerald’s most famous female characters, Daisy Buchanan and Nicole Diver, women whose beauty, charm, and wealth grant them relatively unprecedented power. Interestingly, in marrying Don Harbison, Kate does not identify herself as a Gatsby-figure, one who attempts to create a sense of self through the acquisition of wealth, but rather as a belle who had been misplaced in her family’s rural farm and has now been rightfully resituated in Kingsbury’s most fashionable district. Thus, the details of the Harbison house—its long familial history, grand architectural details, stately trees, and aristocratic driveway—speak to Kate’s sense of who she is when she occupies the house. Accordingly, she dominates all activity within its walls, seeing it as a symbol of her strength and position. Kate’s need to cultivate this careful image of herself often conflicts with her maternal obligations, however, and Mopsy’s untimely departure is merely the first of many losses that Mary Kerr sustains as Kate exerts her absolute control. The most dramatic of these is the loss of Mary Kerr’s father, who dies of a heart attack as he walks home from a dance class with Mary Kerr. Certainly, Kate is not directly responsible for Don’s death, as she is for Mopsy’s, but as Betina Entzminger suggests, Kate “may have played a role in weakening her husband” (145). Entzminger points out that it is soon after their marriage that Don grows ill, and that “[h]e seems to waste away as Kate grows more beautiful and vital” (145). At best, Don has become superfluous after he has given Kate the Harbison name, and, at worst, he is a threat to Kate’s power in that his adoration of Mary Kerr constantly reminds Kate of the coolness of their own marriage. In either scenario, Don Harbison jeopardizes Kate’s sense of herself, and thus, while she mourns his loss, she also uses Don’s death as a means of further establishing her own dominance. In a move that seems almost unfathomably manipulative, she blames Mary Kerr for Don’s heart attack, insisting that it was their shared walk in the sun that triggered his death. In doing so, Kate both positions Mary Kerr as a “home-wrecker” of sorts, one who should be indebted to her mother for allowing her to remain in the family, and denies Mary Kerr’s strong relationship with her father, all but erasing Mary Kerr’s previous conception of home and family.

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After Don’s death, Kate exercises complete authority over Mary Kerr’s life, seeking to impose upon her daughter the values she associates with the southern home. She begins by canceling Mary Kerr’s dance lessons “soon after the funeral” (13). Dance has been integral to Mary Kerr’s life since she was a child. Her talent, even in her youth, is undeniable, and she sees dancing as a form of expression and a means of self-discovery; just as importantly, dance offers Mary Kerr a way of venting her anger and frustration, what she refers to as “dancing it out” (11). Kate justifies her decision to terminate the lessons by explaining that Madame Delida, Mary Kerr’s mildly eccentric teacher, is having an affair with a younger man, a relationship that she contends may corrupt Mary Kerr, whom she views as a budding southern lady. Yet the effect of Kate’s decision is not a strengthening of Mary Kerr’s sense of morality but her utter displacement, a fact that Madame Delida recognizes when she tells Mary Kerr, “This town will never be good to you” (14). Mary Kerr, who has no interest in adopting her mother’s “steel magnolia” persona, cannot function within the stifling confines of the traditional southern community. She reflects on her new sense of dislocation by linking her losses, thinking, So Poppy was gone with his arm to snuggle under, and long ago the white kitten, and now this woman, too, was going, back into the night she had sprung up out of, as Mary Kerr’s mother had said, though not like a weed. She had opened doors now and was leaving. The roof where the sun and the moon beat down was empty. Kate was there below it, a presence in the house. (14)

After Madame Delida is banished by Kate, Mary Kerr is left utterly alone; home is signified only by absence and loss. Significantly, however, when Mary Kerr imagines this barren home, she does not picture her mother as existing comfortably in the environment she has meticulously created. Instead, in Mary Kerr’s rendering of home, Kate is merely “a presence in the house.” Kate’s next move, then, is not as unlikely as it first appears: she decides to sell the Harbison house, quietly moving out while Mary Kerr is sent off to stay with her extended family in Jasper County. While the sale of the house is driven primarily by financial necessity, Kate may also be eager to create a space that is her own. The new duplex she purchases is just down the street from the house Don had inherited, and it retains the original house’s status and charm. Moreover, Kate has scavenged a number of “old Harbison

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things, used now to make a setting for herself alone”; therefore, just as she is able to choose from among the furniture and accessories that are emblematic of the Harbison standing, she is able to maintain the elements of Harbison identity that appeal most to her (30). For example, while she does not allow Mary Kerr to apply for a fellowship that would allow her to attend the dance program at Bennington, Kate borrows money to enable Mary Kerr to “come out” at one of Kingsbury’s country clubs, despite Mary Kerr’s reluctance. Thus, while Kate no longer beats Mary Kerr with a silver hairbrush or locks her in closets, as she used to in the old house, she still is able to intimidate Mary Kerr, and the new house becomes an even stronger symbol of her power than the family’s original home. Yet, when Mary Kerr meets Jeff Blaise, she is introduced to another, alternate form of home. If Kate represents a militant adherence to society’s rules and a passionate desire to succeed within that society, Jeff signifies a mistrust of social conventions. Even before his involvement in the antiestablishment movement that developed in tandem with the Vietnam War, he is interested in unconventional forms of community; when Mary Kerr first meets him, he is living on a commune in Jasper County. Interestingly, Jeff never fully joins the group, but he appears to revel in the notion of a diverse group of people—men and women, black and white—living together in a space that they have created for themselves. When he and Mary Kerr are reunited several years later, Jeff is in graduate school in Kingsbury, and as the “favored student” of Ethan Marbell, a radical political science professor, he finds himself existing among a throng of Ethan’s adoring students, a quasi-family not unlike that of the commune (52). Ethan is “like a father to Jeff,” and the students who listen eagerly to Ethan’s theories, most of which revolve around government conspiracies, also see him as an intellectual and spiritual patriarch of sorts (35). Thus, Ethan and his students represent a paradoxical existence to Mary Kerr. On one hand, their construction of home is alarmingly fractured: they feel profoundly estranged from American society, and at one point Ethan even tells Mary Kerr that “We’re a country within a country” (116). Yet, in the space of Ethan’s home, these “domestic expatriates” become a unified group; Mary Kerr notes that “[t]hey wore their proud denim rags and talked a whirling language and belonged together . . . It was almost another identity here, another planet” (68). While Ethan and his students, including Jeff, feel alienated from their country, then, they are able to locate themselves in this “other planet.”

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As a result, while Mary Kerr is not interested in politics and is slightly unsettled by the casual cohesiveness of the group—she “had never exactly wanted to be one of them” but rather desired “just to be thought of as Jeff’s girl”—she is also fascinated by Ethan (36). Born and raised in Kingsbury, he immediately is identified by “anybody in Kingsbury” as “one of them” while, just as certainly, he also belongs among the unconventional group of students that now surround him (37). Ethan’s home speaks to this dichotomy, and it excites Mary Kerr in its essential difference from the Kingsbury homes that she recognizes: “[T]he general untidiness, the weedy darkness of Ethan’s home exuded a strange appeal. A man of no real-life ties, just thoughts and talk. His address on the side street, his flashlight through the dark to the gate, leading carefully lest they fall over something” (38). Unlike Kate’s home, which is defined by its tasteful furnishings and stylish address, Ethan’s home is notable for its lack of studied sophistication. Yet, Ethan’s home seems as powerful as Kate’s, and the sense of exclusivity that Kate has cultivated is mirrored in the paradoxical opacity of Ethan’s house, which is open to all who choose to visit but in its “weedy darkness” and obscure location is “visible” only to those interested in his political and philosophical insights. While Kate has never visited the Marbell home, regular reports in the form of Kingsbury gossip make her aware of the ways in which Ethan and Jeff’s views do not conform to her own. As Mary Kerr falls more deeply in love with Jeff and becomes increasingly comfortable in the antiwar microcosm that he inhabits, then, Kate views him as a powerful threat to the sense of security she has worked to create. Like the majority of conservative Americans, Kate is irritated by leftist rhetoric and sees the war-protesters’ actions, from picketing to flag-burning, as blatantly anti-American, and she confides in her sister who is frightened by the possible consequences of Mary Kerr’s involvement with the student-demonstrators. However, Kate is not merely a middle-aged woman who is bewildered by the youth culture that has rapidly evolved in response to the Vietnam War. Instead, Kate’s mistrust of Jeff is motivated by her belief that Mary Kerr is no longer dependent upon her; thus, Jeff is not merely an “unsuitable” beau for her daughter, but poses an unstated challenge to the home she has carefully constructed. When Jeff openly questions the nature of her work, charging (accurately) that Kate’s lab is conducting tests on animals to further weapons development, she decides that “[i]n him she knew an adversary, combatant” (83). Yet Kate is also drawn to Jeff, ultimately becoming obsessed with him. Throughout the novel she repeatedly seeks him out and attempts to

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seduce him. We sense that Kate’s desire for Jeff can be attributed in part to a powerful sexual attraction, one that is evinced in the erotic dreams she has about him and in Jeff’s half-mocking acknowledgment that she is “the sexiest woman I ever saw,” but it also represents her need to control Mary Kerr; a successful flirtation with Jeff would rein in Mary Kerr, forcing her to renounce Jeff and acknowledge Kate’s power (76). Kate’s fixation with Jeff, then, speaks in part to her need to vanquish the alternate home that he suggests and to reclaim Mary Kerr. Thus, in her relationship with Jeff, Mary Kerr is wrenched violently between two forms of home, that represented by Jeff and the antiwar movement and that epitomized by her mother. Neither seems to offer her “a landing place, some point to rest her feet on,” however (120). As she sits at Ethan’s house one evening, Mary Kerr is disturbed by the instability that the movement suggests, and she thinks to herself, “To pull [Jeff] away from this ought to be her purpose . . . but where would she pull him to? A life like her mother’s? Or Jasper County?” (38). Neither alternative is appealing. The life her mother has made in Kingsbury is, if reassuringly familiar, cold and inflexible. Kate has explained to Jeff, “I never do anything without the assurance of knowing where and who and what will make the solid ground,” and while the security that Kate demands is in some ways attractive to Mary Kerr, she has also witnessed the often painful consequences of Kate’s stringency. Moreover, as Mary Kerr becomes more entrenched in “the other planet” suggested by Ethan and Jeff, Kingsbury seems less likely to offer her a “solid ground.” She notes, “Since the day she came to Jeff, she gave in to feeling free. But she groped, too, for something that was gone—Kingsbury and its walls were melting down on every side” (69). Even if she is merely a reluctant participant in Ethan’s gatherings, then, she has been influenced by the group’s mistrust of traditional social structures and sees Kingsbury as largely inauthentic. However, Jasper County, Kingsbury’s antithesis, seems an equally hollow model. While the rural area represents the type of communal living that Jeff had flirted with, it is hardly a bucolic ideal: the commune was attacked by local residents who felt threatened by the “wild folks” who inhabited it (25). For Mary Kerr, these locals are just as real as the hippies she met with Jeff; she later learns from Jeff that it is Kate’s brothers, with whom she had stayed in Jasper County while Kate was moving, who had attacked the commune and killed two of its members. Thus, Mary Kerr’s desire to “pull Jeff away” from Ethan’s orbit is rendered moot; she can envision no alternate place to which she can lead him.

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Both Mary Kerr and Jeff are aware, then, that in choosing a life together they have no real model to follow and, instead, they must create a home of their own imagining, one that acknowledges their complicated pasts as well as accommodating their present needs. As a symbol of their new life together, Mary Kerr undergoes a name change, dropping “Kerr,” a family name, and thus signals an escape from her family’s expectations. As Jeff explains to Ethan, “We’re saying Mary now . . . This Mary Kerr girl is gone with the wind”; in pointing out Mary’s symbolic emancipation, Jeff is not only suggesting that Mary is a “new” person, but, in evoking Margaret Mitchell’s novel, he makes a sly allusion to Kate’s dashed hopes for Mary’s success as a belle (67). Mary, too, recognizes that her separation from her mother is essential to her ability to forge a new home with Jeff, yet, even newly christened, she is not fully able to dismiss her family: she tells Jeff, “You may not like all of these people I’m a part of, but they must be who I am, too” (70). For his part, Jeff tells Mary that he cannot renounce his activism in order to live a more conventional life. Even as they assure one another of their love, he insists, “You’ll have to be my girl, just that. Only that. Nothing more, for now. Girls like you think about marrying. It can’t be that way” (65). Thus, while things have “taken a turn for them,” Jeff and Mary are not fully divorced from the ideals of home that have shaped them, and as they attempt to forge a new home, they are haunted by the “home scene” they wish to vacate (69).5

Pilgrim Wanderers: An Uncertain Exile When Mary and Jeff discover that Mary is pregnant, however, they must once again reevaluate the type of home they want to create for themselves. Jeff, rather surprisingly, insists on marriage, an act he once viewed as an empty articulation of establishment values but that he now feels is necessary to provide a “legitimate” home for their child. He also proposes that he and Mary move to Canada to have the baby; from this remove, he can visit the United States as the movement needs him, while Mary and the child will be “out of it, not pushed around and worried” (152). Canada, then, suggests a utopia of sorts to Jeff: he can still be involved in American politics, but he can also live at a distance that will allow him to settle down, something that seemed impossible if he remained in the United States. Canada functions as a tabula rasa in his mind, a site of possibility and reinvention.

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For Mary, Canada also operates as an unknown space, but she finds its uninscribed nature unsettling: she notes, “It was right above us on the map, but so was the North Pole” (151). Unlike Jeff, who sees Canada as an arcadia, Mary views it as a terrifying void, a space that denies her identity rather that one that suggests a new family life. Despite her rigidly apolitical stance, Mary has been able to support Jeff’s commitment to the movement because it mirrors her own dedication to dance. Their separations in the past had been marked by equality: Jeff would travel to attend rallies and demonstrations while Mary would leave Kingsbury to work with prominent troupes. In this instance, however, Jeff is asking that Mary move merely to facilitate his involvement in the movement, and in doing so she will have to sacrifice those things that give her joy: time with Jeff—he will spend much of his time across the border—and dancing—her pregnancy, and presumably her child-rearing duties, will prohibit her from performing. Instead of delighting in the possibility created by a Canadian setting, then, Mary feels “dizzy with resentment,” betrayed both by Jeff and by her own pregnant body (152). Mary’s final decision to move is never fully probed in the novel, and can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Sally Greene, for example, explains that Jeff “had not asked but ordered her to go to Canada,” and Terry Roberts suggests that Mary simply “cannot . . . resist his allure, the romantic tie that binds her to him almost against her will” (“Re-placing” 36; Self and Community 127). Yet while Mary’s relocation to Montreal may in fact be credited in part to her need to please Jeff, she is also driven by the sudden realization that Canada offers her a home that is far from Kate and her new husband, Fred Davis, a wealthy petroleum heir. Mary is able to overcome her reluctance to leave the United States, then, because she realizes that Canada “would be away from Mother. A country she and Fred didn’t, between them, think they owned” (153). While Mary is still uncertain of the type of home that she and Jeff can create for themselves abroad, she becomes confident that it will allow them greater freedom than that which is available to them if they stay. Despite the sacrifices that such a move demands, she is assured that, at the very least, she can finally fully escape her mother’s grasp. With this desire to escape Kingsbury’s provincialism in mind, Jeff and Mary see themselves upon their arrival in Montreal as “pilgrim wanderers, holy and superb, homeless, trusting, lost and innocent in a strange land” (166). Yet, ironically, they are also more closely tethered to their previous notions of home than ever before. Jeff, who

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travels to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago before embarking on a tour of movement rallies, becomes increasingly obsessed with the troubled home that he has left behind, and Mary, who, as she had predicted, has been forced to abandon her dancing because of her pregnancy, finds herself adopting a traditional role similar to the one that her mother had attempted to force upon her. Moreover, in a move that she cannot fully understand herself, Mary names her daughter Kathy, a diminutive form of Kate, unconsciously introducing her mother—and, by extension, Kate’s values—into her own relationship with her daughter. Thus, despite the fact that Mary and Jeff are, in theory, exemplars of a radical new form of home, “pilgrim wanderers” who defy the staid tradition of the American nuclear family, they are, in fact, still preoccupied with the paradigms that had defined their lives in Kingsbury. The tension between the utopian home they have set out to create and the distorted facsimile of traditional American identity that they have adopted takes a measurable toll on both Mary and Jeff. Mary, speaking into a tape recorder provided by her psychiatrist, explains simply, “It was a troubled winter. [Kathy] cried a lot. I had to go to the doctor over and over” (167). Ill, exhausted, and frightened, Mary becomes increasingly frustrated with Jeff. She blames him for the fact that he “had his calling” while she no longer does; however, physically and emotionally drained, she is unable to articulate this complaint, and instead harbors a vague resentment she cannot verbalize (154). Mary ultimately communicates her anger by insisting, “Sex had taken my freedom,” and she withdraws from Jeff both emotionally and physically (167). Most obviously, Mary’s conflation of sex and confinement speaks to the ways she feels imprisoned by her postpartum body and the demands of motherhood; by extension, then, sex also becomes a symbol of an idealized notion of home that does not materialize. In Mary’s mind, it is sex—and the resulting pregnancy—that has robbed her of her identities as a dancer and as Jeff’s equal and subsequently has recast her as a suffering housewife and mother. Jeff seems confounded by Mary’s depression, and he responds by engaging in an affair with Madeleine Spivak, an older French woman who has befriended the couple. While Madeleine has fallen in love with Jeff, he sees their relationship merely as “a need” or “an understanding”; the affair reassures him that sex is liberating rather than confining, and thus is a way of rebutting the charges that Mary has silently levied against him (209). Madeleine, a relatively astute observer of human nature, comprehends that the affair is symptomatic not of

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a lack of love in Jeff and Mary’s relationship, but is an indication of their increasingly discordant notions of home. She muses, Americans want, somewhere, somehow a purity, an inviolability. So why did Jeff Blaise, young husband and father, want to “mess up” his marriage by an affair with me? I think I know. His purity was a stand against the war, a stand that Mary, for all he treasured her, was not very much involved in taking. If she had been dedicated like him, then some kind of affair would have cost her no more than a gnat in her eye. But she wasn’t like that. She came from somewhere. She knew somewhere else. Her mystery was in that. (213)

Madeline surmises here that Jeff is preoccupied with a larger notion of home, one rooted in political ideals. Mary, while never engaged in the antiwar movement, was similarly captivated by ideals, insisting to Jeff early in their relationship, “I’m aesthetic” (50). Yet after their move to Canada, Mary is confronted with a more grounded notion of home, one that is determined by a series of physical realities rather than political or artistic ideals. She is shaped by her knowledge of place and home—what Madeleine identifies simply as “somewhere”— rather than abstract possibility. Jeff and Mary’s divergent notions of home are underscored when Jeff once again sacrifices his immediate home life by leaving for an extended trip to America to attend demonstrations and to write for Ethan’s underground paper. Abandoned by Jeff, deeply wounded by her subsequent discovery of his affair with Madeleine, and distraught when the offer of a position in a Montreal dance company is rescinded, Mary is overcome by a sense of total displacement—a “blind alley feeling”—and attempts suicide (125). Her desire to “vanish” is not simply driven by an abstract sense of despair, however; instead, it speaks to her complex attitudes toward home (155). Mary has never felt “at home” in Canada and cannot foresee any resolution of her painful sense of alienation. Significantly, her attempt at suicide is not merely an end to her isolation, but a way of seeking comfort in a familiar construction of identity; as Sally Greene “notes, “the wish to be out of other people’s way is, as Mary herself would later observe, peculiarly southern . . . More than that, it is a response that southern women are strongly conditioned to fall back on” (“Re-placing” 36). Thus, when the alternate model of home that she and Jeff have tried to create collapses, Mary once again reverts to an identity that is informed by her mother’s example. In desiring to vanish and to cease “causing so much trouble,” she is assuming a tone of deference

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associated with her southern upbringing, and thus finds reassurance in the patterns of southern womanhood (197). Certainly, Mary is still dismissive of Kate’s reliance on an explicitly southern conception of identity, which she views as inherently manipulative; she thinks that Fred has married Kate because “when she talked . . . [he] saw magnolias blooming in the moonlight and felt the South was rising up again, marching out to battle in ranks of gentlemanly gray” (143–44). In short, despite her scientific acumen and keen intelligence, Kate takes on a Blanche-DuBois-like persona when it suits her, a fact that frustrates Mary. Yet, while she mocks Kate’s exploitation of the romantic image of the belle, Mary, like Fred, finds herself drawn to the mythic image Kate is creating, a fact that is evident when she consoles herself with the knowledge that, after her suicide, Kathy will be sent to live with Kate and Fred. Even though she is still scarred by “the silver hairbrush treatment”—the ironically aristocratic beatings Kate has handed down during Mary’s childhood— Mary believes that Kathy will benefit from being raised in the secure home she has failed to create (131). In contemplating suicide, she reassures herself with the thought, “With me gone, [Kathy] could go back to the family” (155). And hearing children playing in the street outside her Montreal apartment, Mary recalls the similar sounds of “Southern children jumping rope and singing” and believes, “Kathy has a right to hear that, too. Maybe Mother will take her home and she’ll hear it, the way I did” (emphasis Spencer’s; 157). In desiring that Kathy have access to a sense of normalcy, no matter how corrupt Mary believes that normalcy to be, we glimpse Mary’s frustration with her inability to forge a meaningful home from the abstract space Canada continues to represent to her. Mary must scrutinize her plans for Kathy when she survives her suicide attempt. Even though Mary has been rescued, Kathy is still sent to live with Kate; Canadian law treats suicide as a crime, and, as part of her punishment, Mary loses custody of Kathy. Mary is devastated by the loss of her daughter, a response that those who step in to care for her cannot fully understand; both Gerda Stewart, an American expatriate who, along with her husband Gordon, supports Mary after her suicide attempt, and Dr. Skoletsky, Mary’s state-mandated psychiatrist, seem confused by Mary’s desperate, and seemingly incongruous, desire to regain custody of her daughter. The only people who seem to understand Mary’s perplexing behavior are Leonard and Hilda Abel, young European exiles. In a scene that recalls “Jean-Pierre,” Mary is working in a library when Leonard, who has come to request help with research, immediately

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identifies her as a lost soul. He and his wife, Hilda, welcome her into their home, and Mary believes that it is “their Jewishness, European Jewishness, sufferings under Hitler and all that” that allows them to “completely, right away, open their hearts to me” (179). They listen to her story, and supported by a group of other European émigrés, Leonard offers to take Mary across the border to kidnap Kathy. Over the course of what Mary identifies as “the heist,” Mary develops a number of theories about why Leonard helps her: she believes that Leonard and Hilda’s childlessness makes then sympathetic to her plight; that Leonard may desire to “[tempt] another fate,” reliving his initial border-crossing after World War II; and that Leonard is attracted to her, and sees their trip as a way of beginning an affair of sorts (178, 181). All of Mary’s suspicions are true to some extent, but Leonard and Hilda are also willing to risk their own safety for the possibility of Kathy’s return because, as exiles of a fascist regime, they are able to understand Mary’s complex relationship to home. As Mary notes, Leonard “knew that ties strengthen under separation and that frustrated passions grow stronger” (182). Thus, unlike Gerda Stewart and Dr. Skoletsky, Leonard and Hilda understand that while Mary had been willing to send Kathy to live with Kate, she is now equally as committed to another attempt to form a new home with her daughter. Moreover, their experience allows them to comprehend that the “frustrated passions” that grow stronger under the conditions of exile also encompass the home that has been violently rejected: Leonard even patiently assists when Mary insists that they return to Kate’s house after they have successfully recovered Kathy so that she can leave a note telling Kate that she loves her. What the Abels are able to understand is that while Mary does not belong in North Carolina or in Montreal, her feelings about both places are overwhelmingly powerful, and her need to respond to them, even in paradoxical ways, is undeniable. And, in fact, Mary’s ambivalence here speaks to a fundamental shift in her thinking: she is coming to overtly reject the binary that has shaped her choices thus far in the novel—she has assumed that she must choose between the southern home that is represented by Kate or the radical notion of home that she and Jeff have been dedicated to forging in Montreal. By reclaiming Kathy and returning to Canada, but leaving a tangible link to her mother in the form of her note, Mary suggests that an alternate form of home is possible, even if it is one she is not yet capable of articulating. After she has recovered Kathy, Mary feels reinvigorated, ready to once again attempt to invent a novel home. It is not merely Kathy’s presence that gives Mary hope, however, but the fact that Leonard

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and Hilda have understood her plight. This sympathy helps her to acknowledge that expatriation does not consist merely of leaving one place for another—substituting a new, more fitting, home for one that is easily dismissed—but that it is a complex, and, at times, frustratingly illogical process. Her new-found insight seems to be felicitously rewarded: almost immediately upon her return to Montreal, Mary finds a note from Gerda expressing her unqualified friendship, an envelope with money from Jeff, and an invitation from her friend and dance teacher, Estes Drover, to join a new troupe. For the first time, then, she is able to identify Montreal as “home” (177). As we might expect, however, Mary’s “epiphany” does not guarantee a sanctified home; in fact, not long after she reestablishes herself in Montreal she is faced with a directive from movement leaders that instructs her to relocate to a rural area above Ottawa. Yet it is with this knowledge of home that she is able to move forward; assured that she does not have to choose one home over another—the southern home that is represented by Kate or the radical home that she and Jeff have been dedicated to creating—Mary is better able to negotiate the myriad of different constructions of home that surround her.

Borrowed Homes and Unlikely Homecomings Not long after her return from the northern wilderness, Jeff and Mary are reunited in Montreal. Jeff has been forced deeper underground after his involvement in what he refers to as “the Big Job,” in which he has bombed a munitions plant in the United States. He has resigned himself to always being “on the run,” and has adopted the alias Geoffrey Blaylock as a means of avoiding detection (308). In a sign of solidarity, Mary too decides to adopt an alias, but unlike her first re-christening, in which she dropped “Kerr” and thus rejected family ties, her new name, Marie Carrée, speaks to her divided loyalties. “Carrée” recalls “Kerr” closely enough to represent a return to family, yet its French form also signifies her allegiance to her new Canadian home. Significantly, she drops “Blaise” or its alternate, “Blaylock,” from her name; while she is committed to her marriage to Jeff, she is also asserting her independence. Thus, her new name symbolizes Mary’s acceptance of a series of divided loyalties: she recognizes herself as both American and Canadian, and as tied to a notion of home that is rooted in her past and one that is entirely of her own design. Mary and Jeff’s growing acceptance of the fluidity of home is also apparent in their decision to squat in a vacation home they encounter

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on a day trip to the Laurentian Mountains. When they see the cottage, it seems to Mary to be “like a gingerbread house . . . in a fairy tale,” and when Kathy innocently proposes that they live there, Mary and Jeff take her suggestion seriously (311). As they inhabit the house, Jeff observes that they are much like the three bears in the popular fairy tale. The comparison seems apt, not only because they are a family of three or because they make themselves at home in the cottage after they essentially have broken in, but, like the three bears, they seem to find everything in the cottage to be “just right.” While the South has been too restrictive and Montreal has been, for the most part, too unstable, the borrowed house seems entirely comfortable to them. They stay in the cottage undetected for a week, the length of time that their grocery money lasts, and then reluctantly return to Montreal. As they prepare to depart, Jeff observes, “ ‘I see why people put up monuments. But not for dead people. There ought to be monuments for great moments.’ He got out of the car and stood, raising his hand and finger, writing on the air: ‘Mary, Jeff, and Kathy . . . they were happy here’ ” (313). Jeff’s ephemeral “monument” to their temporary home is suggestive of the ways in which Mary and Jeff’s understanding of home is evolving, transgressing traditional boundaries and expectations. Yet, like their interlude in the cottage and their monument to it, the period of domestic security suggested by their experience in the borrowed house is fleeting. When Jeff and Mary return to Montreal, they learn that the cottage has burned down and that they are suspected of vandalizing it. They are uncertain if the fire’s causes are natural—a lightning storm seems a likely culprit—or political—Jeff cannot rule out the possibility that someone has tried to kill him; regardless of the fire’s origin, however, the destruction of the cottage symbolizes the ways in which the temporary homes that they have occupied are incapable of providing meaningful physical and emotional shelter. Once again, Mary and Jeff find that they are doubly displaced, cast out from the cottage itself and blamed for its ruin in the larger home that they have created in Montreal. But while Mary and Jeff are distressed by the cottage’s destruction, they use the event not to mourn yet another lost home, but to reevaluate their existing construction of home. They invite all the people they know in Montreal—friends, coworkers, and even the cottage’s rightful owners—to apologize for any role they may have played in the fire. In speaking to the disparate group about their week at the cottage, they are able to transcend issues of agency in the cottage’s destruction and to reflect on their larger experience in Canada. Jeff

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explains, “[W]e found the . . . house by accident and—well, we just quietly and with great respect did what we’ve been doing in your country for some years now: we refugeed in it” (322–23.) In their period as “the three bears,” Jeff, Mary, and Kathy have an exaggerated sense of the isolation that has shaped much of their Canadian experience; yet, in talking to the group of exiles and natives that they have gathered, they are able to reflect on their remove in new ways, acknowledging the fact that all of the homes they have inhabited have been shared spaces. Consequently, the meeting becomes one not only of contrition but of communion, and Jeff and Mary are able to see themselves as located within a larger nexus of belonging. In assuaging some of the anxiety of exile, the meeting also induces Mary and Jeff to engage in a less severe reconsideration of the homes they have left behind in America. Their need for familial and cultural reconciliation is evident when, not long after the meeting, Ethan dies and Jeff becomes visibly restless. When he insists, “I can’t live in exile . . . I won’t do it” and plans to return to America, he is only responding in part to the impotency he feels in his distance from the movement’s epicenter (325). Unlike his previous trips, which are driven solely by his commitment to the cause, Jeff is now equally propelled by his need for reunion. He has been unable to see Ethan before his death, but, as he later realizes, he is eager to see his father and to introduce him to Mary and Kathy. Moreover, he wants to close “the door to nonstop worry” that their exile has caused (331). Thus, even though he knows that his capture is likely if he attempts to enter the United States, he is willing to risk imprisonment or conscription to ensure that “[they will] let us come back some day” (346). Mary identifies Jeff’s decision to return to the United States as something he “had to do” and supports him in his return (325). Yet, when Jeff is indeed arrested and sent to serve in Vietnam, she finds herself alone in Montreal again, faced with many of the same dilemmas that had shaped her early experience in exile. Just as she had in her initial days in Canada, Mary resists the pull of the southern home, instead dedicating herself to the home she has created with Estes Drover, her dance partner; she explains, “When Mother and Fred begged to come and take me home, I found ways of dodging it. What’s kin? An accident of blood” (327). Yet, as she has determined once before, home’s draw is not so easily dismissed, and her connection to her mother cannot be rejected merely as an “accident.” Thus, when Kate’s sister-in-law, Jane, is sent as an emissary of home in an attempt to convince Mary that she should allow Kathy to “visit” Kate

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and Fred, Mary ultimately demurs, once again sending Kathy to live with her mother. Estes, in this case functioning as a surrogate for the novel’s readers, is shocked by her decision. He is incapable of understanding how Mary could once again fall prey to Kate’s manipulation, fearing that, despite the success of the earlier “heist,” “You’ll never have [Kathy] back” (350). Mary’s explanation of her decision is enlightening, however. Her initial rationale—that Kathy is deserving of the luxury that her mother and Fred can provide—echoes her previous belief that, despite her manipulative nature, Kate offers a more secure home for Kathy than Mary can provide. Yet, significantly, Mary also suggests that she has acted not only in Kathy’s interest, but in Kate’s. She explains to Estes that she was influenced by Jane’s account of “Mother’s feeling she was such a flop with me, and still wanting another chance. It’s mother they worry about, how she’s facing a blank wall, drinking too much, no path in life . . .” (349). Mary recognizes her own feelings of dislocation in Kate; the “blank wall” and pathlessness that Jane associates with Kate mirror Mary’s own desperation in her early days of exile. By sharing Kathy with Kate then, Mary is not simply trying to provide a secure home for Kathy but for Kate as well. Thus, in sending Kathy to live with Kate, Mary is, like Jeff, attempting a risky form of reconciliation. Just as he allows himself to be enlisted into service for the war he has dedicated himself to stopping, sacrificing his principles to preserve a chance for his family to return home, Mary sends her only daughter to live with her mother, keeping open the possibility of reunion. As Jane explains to her, “The world is linked. It’s bound together. Wander if you want to, if you must, but know that the ties that bind are holding you forever” (334). Mary does not intend to move back to America in the near future, and, in fact, Kathy does not stay with Kate for long—she becomes homesick and Fred allows her to return to Mary. Yet Mary chooses to acknowledge the “ties that bind,” maintaining an awareness of her mother’s construction of home in her own evolving notion of home. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the novel’s critics often identify the conclusion of The Night Travellers as essentially optimistic. Such a reading denies the novel’s closing “facts”: Kate has spiraled into unmitigated despair; Mary is once again separated from Jeff; and, in the novel’s closing image, Jeff finds himself in the battlefields of Vietnam, facing an unseen enemy. Yet, despite the overwhelming alienation that envelops her, Mary seems to have discovered an unlikely sense of sanctuary. In the novel’s penultimate chapter, she thinks, “People appear, coming nearer . . . Voices call, dwindling but

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never quite extinguished, outside, from beyond the snows. Jeff will appear like that again; the voice must be Mother’s, she the lost wanderer calling; I the fixed point at home” (emphasis Spencer’s; 364). Although she is still deprived of what might seem to be essential components of a permanent home—in this case, a supportive mother, a present husband, or a place to which she feels connected—in the spatialized model that Mary articulates here, we see that she has finally achieved a sense of security, one that is, rather paradoxically, informed by her acceptance of the essential flux of home. Both Jeff and Kate, who have represented the binaries of the Southern home on one hand and the radical rejection of it on the other, are now seen as satellites to the home that Mary herself represents. In short, Mary has discovered the ungridded area Rachel DuPlessis describes and has located herself within it. Thus, The Night Travellers ultimately presents an extraordinarily complex vision of home. Mary Kerr Harbsion/Mary Blaise/Marie Carrée is one of Spencer’s most challenging protagonists; she is a complex, three-dimensional character whose decisions are not always easily understood. As readers, we are often charged with watching her retrace her steps, repeat her mistakes, and resist the kind-hearted attempts of others to guide her down less perilous avenues. Yet, Mary is also one of Spencer’s most captivating characters, and her confusion is as much a reflection of her time as it is indicative of her personal demons. Her attempts to mediate the myriad of homes that she encounters—many hostile, others ultimately unstable—speaks to the social, cultural, and political turmoil of America in the 1960s and, as Elizabeth Spencer’s biography attests, of the South in the postRenaissance age. None of the spaces that Mary inhabits—her family’s antebellum mansion, a series of anonymous Canadian apartments, the squatters’ cottage, and even her own body—are rigidly defined; ultimately all are marked by fluidity, and it is only because of her varied and often difficult border crossings that she is able to begin to imagine—and perhaps even to create—a space that is both “ungridded” and stable. Certainly, the novel provides no easy answers, yet in its assertion that no single version of home can fully accommodate complex notions of identity, it poses a radical challenge to existing ideologies, and in its insistence that it is only through the intersection of multiple homes that “the ties that bind” can also be constructed as liberating, The Night Travellers offers a revolutionary re-envisioning of home. In The Night Travellers, then, we witness the full evolution of Elizabeth Spencer’s work: in her Mississippi novels, Spencer effectively echoes the Quentinian lament, “I don’t hate it,” by exploring

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distinctly white, male responses to a changing South. Her protagonists are, much like Quentin Compson, perpetually tortured southern selves, torn between an allegiance to the home to which they feel spiritually tethered and a disdain for the inequities and elisions that they know all too well. The Light in the Piazza, however, circumvents these Faulknerian themes: Spencer’s female protagonist, Margaret Johnson, realizes that home can be defined outside of the South’s clear geographical borders and ideological boundaries, and the binaries of southern identity that had constrained Spencer’s early protagonists give way to the possibilities suggested by a literal and metaphorical “third space.” Finally, and most crucially, in her mature work, including the stories in Jack of Diamonds and The Night Travellers, Spencer frees herself almost entirely from the rhetoric of the Renaissance, effectively disarming Quentin Compson’s (and, by extension, the Southern Renaissance’s) obsession with place by introducing a new—and unexpected—set of questions about space, home, and identity. In these works, characters are able to privilege fluidity over a monolithic construction of identity, ultimately even finding comfort in the terror and confusion that accompanies geographical and spiritual dislocation. It is this unlikely layering of the permanent and the peripatetic, the fixed and the fractured, that, in part, makes Elizabeth Spencer’s work so fascinating. Certainly, in many ways the narrative threads she explores are not new, even in southern literature, a tradition that is grounded in an exaggerated valorization of home; we need think back only as far as Huck Finn explaining to his readers that he has “got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” to be reminded that palimpsest spaces are often central to attempts at growth and change. But in her work Spencer does not merely depict the wanderer and the homebody, the exile and the native, but in fact, fleshes out the claim made by Linda McDowell in her study Gender, Identity, and Place (1999) that “the term ‘the home’ must be one of the most loaded words in the English language” (71). Spencer, of course, cannot easily defuse this term for us, but her fiction does probe its paradoxes, and her oeuvre suggests new cartographies of the southern home, those literal—in its expansion of the borders of southern experience; spiritual—in its exploration of her characters’ complex responses to a myriad of homes; and artistic—in its growing challenge to the expectations established by her literary mentors. Ultimately, then, Elizabeth Spencer’s gift for merging familiar and foreign terrain challenges conventional southern ideological topographies, and suggests that there is much more of southern identity to be mapped.

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Introduction 1. Haskell is not alone in her contention that Spencer’s work is often neglected, nor in her belief that it will reach a new audience. Jonathan Yardley, the longtime book critic for The Washington Post, identifies Spencer as among a group of “unjustly overlooked and underrated writers” and has suggested that her oeuvre merits reevaluation (C1+). Similarly, Sven Birkerts writes that Spencer “[has] been suffering the curse—peculiar to America—of being very good but also very unread” and suggests that “if we had a culture of serious readers, [she] would have name-brand recognition” (304–305). 2. In fact, some of Spencer’s Italian fiction, such as The Light in the Piazza, is most commonly linked to Henry James and E.M. Forster rather than William Faulkner or Eudora Welty. See, e.g., Terry Roberts’s discussion of Spencer’s Italian novellas in Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer (50–62). 3. Simpson identifies the fifty writers and editors of The History of Southern Literature (1985) as representative of this generation, and the five senior editors (Rubin, Lewis Simpson, Byden Jackson, Rayburn S. Moore, and Thomas Daniel Young) are generally seen as its elder statesmen (250). In Inventing Southern Literature, Michael Kreyling draws this circle even wider, including scholars who studied or worked with Rubin at Chapel Hill or have been included in the Southern Literary Studies series he edited for the Louisiana State University Press (n. 42). 4. Jefferson Humphries makes a similar argument in his introduction to Southern Literature and Literary Theory (1990), “On the Inevitability of Theory in Literary Studies,” when he argues that we [writers from “the post-Rubin generation”] have in common one thing that sets us apart from our elders in our conception of the South and our approach to southern literature and history: the basic assumption that the meaning and significance of literature is not the imminence of the literary object, or in history, but in the complex ways in which the literary, the historical, and all the “human sciences” that study both, are interrelated. (viii.)

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6.

7.

8.

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Humphries’s argument speaks to the enduring recognition of the South as an unassailable entity and, as tellingly, reveals that theoretical approaches that were commonplace in American literary studies in 1990, when the essay was published, were still new to southern studies. As early as the 1980s, “establishment” critics such as Rubin and Hugh Holman acknowledged that the discipline of southern studies was becoming trapped by its overly rigid adherence to the boundaries that it had created. For example, in his often-cited essay “No More Monoliths, Please: Continuities in the Multi-Souths,” Holman concedes, “Most of us, by omitting a little that cannot be made to fit, selecting from the rest rather carefully, and, like Procrustes, fitting in what we select to our particular narrow beds, arrive at conveniently simple answers to the question of what southern literature is all about” (xiv). Scholars have noted that Kreyling’s attack on paradigmatic thinking often takes this form itself. As Ernest Suarez argues in a Southern Quarterly review, “[B]ecause Inventing Southern Literature reduces literature and southern literary theory to sets of competing ideologies, it suffers the grave weakness of neglecting aesthetic value almost completely” (883). Similarly, Fred Hobson argues that Kreyling’s work “suffers from a kind of reductive thinking that divides the Southern camps into forces of enlightenment and darkness,” a binary that results is the “misrepresentation” of scholars’ work (Baym et al. 673, 672). These issues aside, I tend to agree with most scholars, including those who take issue with aspects of Kreyling’s work, that the book’s project of attempting to reveal the politics of canon formation is crucial to its “reinvention.” While both Inventing Southern Literature and Dirt and Desire, are seen as groundbreaking studies, prompting separate symposiums in The Mississippi Quarterly [Spacks et al. “A Symposium: Writing the South” (2000–2001) and Baym et al. “A Symposium: The Business of Inventing the South” (1999)], they are certainly not alone in their progressive approaches to southern women’s literature. I have chosen to focus on them here because they have been most useful in my thinking on Spencer. For a broader discussion of recent feminist scholarship, see Anne E. Rowe’s “The Study of Southern Women’s Literature” and Barbara Ladd’s “Literary Studies: The Southern United States, 2005.” In his response to Dirt and Desire, Jay Watson identifies the omission of Spencer, as well as writers such as Ellen Glasgow, Evelyn Scott, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith, among others, as one of the book’s weaknesses. He asks, [Are] these writers any more acquiescent to the Southern status quo, any less invested in resistance and critique, than, say O’Connor, McCullers, Walker, Morrison, or Lillian Smith? All in

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all, probably not . . . It will fall to other critics working in the aftermath of Dirt and Desire—including, I hope, Yeager herself—to expand her archive to include this other, less obstreperous female tradition. (Spacks et al. 106) 9. Spencer has invoked this term herself. In a 1990 interview, she said, “I think there’s a pagan belief that’s common among southern writers. Place is sacred. There is a spirit there to be worshipped or violated” (Roberts, “A Whole Personality” 221). 10. “Space” and “place” are recognized as having distinct properties. In Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin explain that “In short, empty space becomes place through language, and in the process of being written and named” (175). In her introduction to The Geography of Identity, Patricia Yeager cites Jonathan Sime’s definition of place, which suggests that space is an abstract understanding of an environment while place is defined by an emotional connection between a person and that space. Yeager argues that there is a natural slippage between these terms, however: “In a global economy where multiple places converge in a single space, where the space/ place binary becomes porous and provisional, we need to destabilize the organicism of and integrity that place-centered analysis sometimes assumes, to recognize within a transnational economy the strange effects that happen in the margins between ‘space’ and ‘place’ ” (5n.). My study hopes to explore the moments in which space and place merge in Spencer’s characters’ understanding of home. 11. Works that fall into this first category include, for example, Robert Brinkmeyer’s Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West (2000) and Jeffery Folks and Nancy Summers Folks’ collection The World is Our Home (2000). Groundbreaking collections that investigate the South in a transnational context include Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith’s South to a New Place (2002); Jon Smith and Deborah N. Cohn’s Look Away: The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004); and the 2006 American Literature special symposium edited by Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer entitled “Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies.” 12. I borrow this term from Richard Gray’s Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (2000). Gray argues that writing that falls outside of Fugitive-Agrarian dictated norms “was, and to an extent still is, marginalized” (x). 13. I will identify Prenshaw’s book as ES in future references. 14. These collections will be referred to as Spencer Collection NLC and Spencer Collection UNC, respectively.

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Chapter  1. For a feminist response to King, see, e.g., Carol Manning’s introduction to The Female Tradition in Southern Literature and her essay in that collection, “The Real Beginning of the Southern Renaissance” (1–14, 37–56). 2. In my account of Spencer’s early biography, I rely heavily on her 1998 memoir, Landscapes of the Heart. No archival records of Spencer’s childhood exist, and Spencer’s other accounts of her early life—essays such as “Emerging as a Writer in Faulkner’s Mississippi” (1982) and stories such as “A Christian Education” (1974)—are repeated, often in very similar form, in Landscapes of the Heart. 3. Spencer’s paternal grandfather, Elijah Harrison Spencer, whom she never met, served in the Confederate Army, eventually losing an arm at Gettysburg. Thus, despite the fact that she was born in 1921, Spencer is removed from the Civil War by only one generation on both sides of her family, a fact that is remarked upon in almost all early studies of her work. 4. His son, John Sidney McCain III, now a Republican U.S. Senator from Arizona and a two-time presidential candidate, served as an admiral as well and has gained fame for his bravery as a POW in Vietnam. Despite her long allegiance to the Democratic party, Spencer is proud to claim her connection to McCain and has corresponded with him about issues of importance to her. 5. In her memoir, Spencer explains that Elizabeth’s reverence for the works of Sir Walter Scott inspired her to christen the family plantation “Waverly,” although Teoc, the land’s original Choctaw name, remained its popular designation. This dedication to Scott’s novels is almost a southern cliché: Scott’s work commonly is recognized as a touchstone for the romantic refashioning of the ideals of the Old South. In The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash writes, “Walter Scott was bodily taken over by the South and incorporated into the Southern people’s vision of themselves. If it is not strictly true that, as H.J. Eckenrode has it, his novels (which one Yankee bookseller said he sent below the Potomac by the truckload) ‘gave the South its stoic ideal,’ it is unquestionable that they did become the inspiration for such extravaganzas as the opera bouffe title of ‘the chivalry’ ” (67–68). Similarly, Daniel Joseph Singal identifies Scott’s books as “as much a southern staple as cotton itself,” and cites the popularity of reenactments of the novels’ feudal narratives (13). That Scott’s novels would be recognized as one of the family’s greatest treasures, then, speaks not only to the importance of literature to the McCains, but their investment in the mythic conception of southern identity that Scott’s work suggests. 6. This view of the role of the Cavalier myth as central to the restoration of a strong southern identity is widely held by historians, but may be put most succinctly by Daniel Joseph Singal: “By setting

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forth the heroic figure of the southern gentleman, with his heroic ability to bring order and culture to all he surveyed, it enabled southerners to convince themselves and others that the South enjoyed the most stable and civilized society in America” (18). As Singal, W.J. Cash, Anne Firor Scott, Kathryn Lee Siedel, Anne Goodwyn Jones, and other historians have noted, this “order” was equally dependent upon the subservience of white women. 7. Luther Spencer’s position as an entrepreneur would always grant him a slightly diminished standing than that held by the dashing McCains. By the time Elizabeth was an adult, Luther was a relatively wealthy man, but, as almost all South-watchers have observed, wealth and status are often independent of one another in a southern consideration of social class. Spencer writes, “The McCain plantation at Teoc was still mortgaged following the war, and so would remain until my father and my uncle combined to put it on a paying basis in the late 1940s. But the large property itself, the numerous black tenants, plus the prestige of relatives in distant places, gave my mother’s family a higher social level than my father’s, felt but never mentioned” (Landscapes 55). 8. Almost every major overview of Spencer’s work includes an account of her initial meeting with Welty. Spencer was selected by her writing group to invite Welty, who had just published A Curtain of Green, to speak to the group. Welty declined to speak about her own work, but demurred when asked to come as a guest and discuss the students’ writing. Impressed by Spencer’s story and charmed by her “free spirit,” Welty stayed in touch with Spencer (Welty, Stories xiii). Spencer recalls this meeting in a short essay for the Welty Newsletter (2–3) and in her memoir, while Welty uses the incident as the central anecdote in her Foreword to The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (ix–xi). (See also n. 19 and n. 21.) 9. Spencer’s experience is not an anomaly. Peter Taylor, who had preceded Spencer at Vanderbilt, recalls a similar story of his acceptance into the Fugitive-Agrarian circle. He explains that as he was registering for classes, I had the good luck to find myself across the table from Mr. Donald Davidson (in those days professors did all manner of work.) Donald Davidson was pleased that I had come with recommendations from Allen Tate. At once he led me over to another table where John Crowe Ransom was busily registering students. And he said to Mr. Ransom (I can hear his voice now as clear as clear. It was that important to me, that I should now remember it as clear as ever): ‘John, here’s a boy Allen has sent us from Memphis.’ In retrospect, I can think to myself only: That’s how it was in those days—the small, old world we know in Tennessee.” (Emphasis in the original; 18)

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Taylor’s recollection reveals both the insularity of the Vanderbilt English program and the mythic power of the figures that populated it. 10. Richmond C. Beatty writes that “[t]he reason this atmosphere could exist at all was due, I think, to a phenomenon increasingly rare in our time, namely that they were men who belonged to an essentially common background. They understood the language of one another, and by language I mean the primary ways in which we think about Religion, the people with whom we live, and about the relation of the individual to the state. In other words, the atmosphere which these gifted young writers found prevalent at their university was homogeneous, not heterogeneous.” (Emphasis in the original; 392) 11. I adopt here the dates employed by John Bradbury in his study, The Fugitives: A Critical Account. The Fugitive, the “little magazine” produced by the group, was published from April 1922 until December 1925. 12. While the Fugitive-Agrarians, as well as later southern critics, associated women writers with sentimental literature, much of this work was produced by men. As Carol Manning points out, “[o]ne only need think of the short stories of Thomas Nelson Page” to be reminded of this fact (“On Defining Themes” 3). 13. Certainly, Faulkner’s treatment of female characters has been a source of critical debate for some time. While many critics take issue with characterizations of Faulkner’s women as either “great, sluggish, mindless daughters of peasants, whose fertility and allure are scarcely distinguishable from a beast in heat” or “febrile, almost fleshless but sexually insatiable daughters of the aristocracy,” as Leslie Fielder has identified them, Faulkner’s treatment of women is not easily categorized (321). As Noel Polk has observed, “there is throughout Faulkner something disturbing about the comprehensiveness with which women in his work are associated with blood and excrement and filth and death” (203). 14. Identifying the group’s “female protégées” is a complicated endeavor. In studying under Davidson and then working with Warren and Tate, Spencer can clearly be identified as a Fugitive-Agrarian “legatee,” and in early critical works, such as Richard K. Meeker’s 1958 essay “The Youngest Generation of Southern Fiction Writers” and even Davidson’s own essay “The Southern Writer and the Modern University” (1958), she is recognized as a member of the “secondgeneration Vanderbilt school” (Meeker 175). Yet later critical works tend to reformulate the Fugitive-Agrarian circle of influence. For instance, Spencer is only briefly mentioned in Charlotte Beck’s otherwise excellent study The Fugitive Legacy, which traces the careers of the group’s “heirs,” such as Peter Taylor, whose training in many

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15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

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ways parallels Spencer’s. Of the women writers that Beck does include—Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor—Porter and Welty were not “trained” by the group; the Fugitive-Agrarians functioned primarily as editors and sponsors after they were already mature writers. (It should be noted, too, that Beck is not alone in this model; studies such as Jan Nordby Gretlund’s Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place, which traces the Agrarian influence in Welty’s early work, also position women writers who published in Fugitive-Agrarians journals and anthologies as protégées.) Davidson’s reference to “knowledge of the heart” is borrowed from Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Certainly, none of the other Fugitive-Agrarians were as vocal about their attitudes toward “the race problem,” although their critical and creative work often reveals a deep anxiety about the role of African Americans in the South. Warren’s essay “The Briar Patch” is the only contribution to I’ll Take My Stand that addresses race, and it, in essence, advocates a “separate-but-equal” approach to race relations. Tellingly, that Davidson saw “The Briar Patch”—which Warren later rejected in Segregation (1956)—as too “progressive” and identified it in a letter to Allen Tate as tainted with “the smack of latter-day sociology” (qtd in Kreyling 17). See Bloom, xi–xlvii, for further discussion of what he also identifies as “the anguish of contamination.” In an essay in The History of Southern Women’s Literature, Rosemary M. Magee uses the relationship between Welty and Spencer as an exemplar of a successful mentoring relationship, and this view is casually echoed in discussions of both authors; for example, in her biography of Welty, Ann Waldron refers to Spencer as Welty’s “protégé” (227, 331). Magee acknowledges, however, that female mentoring relationships were often set outside the boundaries of the academic world, and thus while they provided a sense of “thrilling friendship and sympathy” (Ellen Glasgow’s description of her correspondence with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings) they often lacked the measurable professional advantages provided in male mentoring relationships (331). Welty herself felt removed from a community of women writers. In the introduction to Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens, Louise Westling cites an interview in the Paris Review in which “Welty explained that although she and her fellow writers knew and respected each other’s work and some enduring friendships had been formed among them, she was not aware of any definite links or passing-about of influence” (1). In fact, later in her career Spencer exhibited concern that as southern women writers, she and Welty would be confused in the literary marketplace. While Spencer has recognized that being labeled a “southern

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writer” generates a series of specific expectations, she understood that the label of “southern women writer” further narrowed critical and popular assessments of an author’s work. This is evident in a particularly candid letter to Louis Rubin, dated September 17, 1980, in which she discusses the forthcoming release of The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer: About the collection and Eudora’s stories—mine won’t be out till February, as I think I may have mentioned. In a way I rather regretted, (though in another I’m enormously grateful to her,) that the eager, very bright young editor at Doubleday got gung-ho about having her [Welty] do an introduction to the book . . . I had really nothing to do with this, they just called me and said Isn’t it wonderful that Eudora has consented . . .! etc. I couldn’t say, Well, no it isn’t so wonderful, just let the stories go on their own. Neither could she, I guess, tell them she wouldn’t do it . . . the literary society meeting at Belhaven all over again. What to do? I just had to mind my manners and let it go. The point is There’s too much association of one Southern writer with another, one Woman writer with another, all this in the harried critical mind, trying to sort things out. I was at first disappointed about the book’s postponement, but then I heard about the Welty stories [The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, released October 1980] and was somewhat relieved not to be appearing at the same time. Maybe the reviewers will lump us, maybe I’ll get ignored, who knows?” (Ellipses Spencer’s; Louis Rubin Manuscript Collection) 21. Spencer did share drafts of short stories with a number of her friends, most notably the poet (and Spencer’s literary executor) Robert Phillips. 22. I borrow this term from Linda Wagner-Martin’s study Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention (ix). 23. Many of Fire in the Morning’s critics have focused on the novel’s Faulknerian elements, and in her study Elizabeth Spencer, Peggy Prenshaw cautions against broad assumptions of Faulknerian influence. She notes that although there is evidence that Spencer’s Tarsus from time to time overlaps with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha . . . there is also striking evidence that it is often raw rather than literary material that Spencer shares with Faulkner. There is, for example, a remarkable resemblance between Spencer’s Guptons and the Gowries of Intruder in the Dust, but there is little question of influence since both novels were published in 1948.” (ES 30) 24. Spencer was not merely haunted by the specter of Faulkner: they met several times over the course of her career, including a dinner they

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attended with Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon in Rome. Moreover, in a 1976 letter to her friend Gertrude Hooker, Spencer explained that during the period in which she lived in Oxford as a lecturer at the University of Mississippi (1948–1951), Faulkner’s circle of family and friends was a constant presence: [I]t is nigh impossible to be in Oxford without getting emmeshed [sic] in that [Faulkner-Oldham-Franklin] connection. It’s true Faulkner was nearly a recluse except for certain intimates like Ella Sommerville, Nina and John Cully, and Colonel Evans, but the rest of the tribe were anything but recluses and if one was of any interest at all it would be hard to escape. . . . Phil Stone, for instance, Faulkner’s best friend at one time and mentor was after me from the time I hit Oxford, for someone had told him I was writing, although at the time my first book had not appeared. A friend who knew Mrs. Faulkner immediately dragged me over to meet her as she was looking for someone to take one of her vacant rooms. (Elizabeth Spencer Manuscript Collection NLC) Thus, in some ways Spencer actively sought to distance herself from Faulkner, including choosing not to live in his mother’s home. On a related note, while she felt that Oxford was preoccupied by Faulkner and his legacy, Spencer believed that his house was strangely unmarked by his presence. In the same letter to Hooker, she describes a 1976 visit to Rowan Oak: “[T]he house seems about as Faulkner left it, very bare, rather depressing, an un-lived in feeling like people who are camping in someone else’s house. It is quite beautiful, in the old classical style, and must have housed a strong family in the pre-Faulkner days. One feels it is still theirs.” It is remarkable that although Faulkner was preoccupied with the notion of the southern home—and that, in fact, this house became so emblematic of his work—Spencer would find Rowan Oak untouched by his years of living there. 25. The connection between Randall Gibson and Quentin Compson is further underscored in Randall’s long monologue midway through the novel in which he recounts the Gerrards’ various sins. Like Quentin in Absalom, Absalom!, Randall reveals that, in fact, he has little evidence for his claims and much of his history is imagined (100). 26. Quentin’s protest at the conclusion of Absalom, Absalom! that “I don’t hate it . . . I don’t. I don’t!” has become the most famous refrain of profound southern ambivalence (303). 27. See Linda Wagner-Martin’s essay “ ‘Just the Doing of It’: Southern Women Writers and the Idea of Community” for a discussion of the radically diverse ways in which the notion of community may be interpreted and employed by women writers.

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28. While this emphasis on traditional patriarchal community marked Renaissance fiction, it was certainly not new within the tradition of southern literature; rather, it was a remnant of the mythology of the Old South. As Betina Entzminger notes, the antebellum southern women who wrote for publication reinforced the social structure even though it often necessitated for them a masked stance. Though they may have had conflicting views about the enslavement of another race, they overtly validated the patriarchal family structure of strong-benevolent husband-father and physically weak but morally strong wife-child . . . (1–2) 29. The irony, of course, is that we learn that she has “misnamed” both children: Justin McCarthy is a man, not a woman, and the portrait that inspired Henrietta to name Lance was not of Lancelot but of Sir Galahad. Thus, Henrietta does not comprehend the tradition that she seeks to venerate. 30. With the exception of a few passages that Spencer dedicates to Kinloch’s interior monologues, Elinor is the only other character in the novel that is given this immediate, first-person voice. This shift in narrative voice is telling; we glean most of our sense of the characters’ development through lengthy speeches, like those of Randall Gibson and Dr. Derryberry, yet Spencer grants Elinor, whose contribution to family discussions are generally ignored by those around her, a unique platform in the novel. We may read these interior monologues as an indication of Elinor’s unexpected authority within the novel’s construction; however, they also signal the fact that Elinor has no one else to whom she can speak. 31. The collection of replies to Mead, Dodd’s request for promotional blurbs is incomplete, and unpublished Fugitive-Agrarian responses to Spencer’s later novels are not included in her papers. In response to an inquiry about such correspondence, Spencer explained, “I did have many letters after my first book came out from the VU group— Ransom, Davidson, Warren especially. I used to throw mail away after answering it. I never thought anyone would be interested. I began saving it much later on” (“Canada”). 32. See, e.g., the unsigned review in Time, which suggests that “her characters seem scooped from Faulkner” (“Troubles in the Delta” 108). A similar view is espoused by critic Elsa Nettles, who links the novel specifically to Absalom, Absalom!, as I do here. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, however, argues that “Spencer’s assumptions about the Southern culture are closer to those of Robert Penn Warren in All the King’s Men (1946) than to Faulkner’s in Absalom, Absalom! (1936)” (ES 47). And while, as I note later, Spencer herself sees Faulkner’s stylistic influence in the novel, she rejects larger comparisons. In an undated manuscript titled “Spencer

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interview” found in her papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Spencer has typed a response to the question “My favorite of my books, and why?”: I think This Crooked Way, though the writing is not so mature or sustained as in others, like, say, The Voice at the Back Door, had original, deeply felt ground to explore. It was something I don’t think Faulkner—giving his awesome genius every due— ever touched on, and when Flannery O’Connor came along, her strict Roman Catholic point of view prevented her seeing it, to my mind, as it was . . . The religious fervor of the willful, ego-centered man, his sense of a personal God-mission, the way he took to express it, the way it took him, the myth of it and the ritualistic resolution . . . this all holds me still as being rendered in an accurate way, despite stylistic flaws. As my discussion indicates, while I agree that the novel is exploring “deeply felt ground,” I also tend to find some truth in the charge that Spencer’s publisher at the time, Edward Dodd, poses in a July 11, 1955, letter to Spencer in which he suggests that This Crooked Way “was not enough of a departure, or let us say it was still somewhat derivative, you hadn’t become entirely yourself . . .” (Spencer Collection NLC). For further discussion of the connections between This Crooked Way and Faulkner’s work, also see Terry Roberts’s insightful chapter on the novel in Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer (20–34). 33. In contrast to the frustrating relationship to his father, Amos is, along with Ned, his mother’s favorite child. When he first leaves Yacona, he overhears her bemoaning the fact that “the two that’s my heart are the two that leave” (18). Amos is deeply moved by the revelation that “his mother cared specially for him,” yet it is his father’s approval that he is desperate to have: even after Clyde’s death, Amos demands of his corpse, “Did you side with Ephraim, Papa?” (18, 16). Again in Spencer’s work, it is the recognition of the father that is crucial to the protagonist’s sense of self. 34. It should be noted that Amos’s claim to the land stands in sharp contrast to the mythic vision of the southern plantation: he “inherits” it not from his father but a man who isn’t even a southerner and, in fact, Amos cannot trace the ownership of the land beyond Wu Tang Jones, who has not even seen the property. Thus, Amos is dealing with particularly “raw materials” in creating a plantation out of this swamp land, both literally and symbolically. 35. Ary’s miscarriage is remarkable in that she has become pregnant to satiate Amos’s desire to continue his line with a son; yet she loses the pregnancy in a moment when she feels particularly uncertain about her place in her own lineage: she is sitting on a rocking chair at

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37.

38.

39.

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Dellwood when she vividly remembers having her hand caught under the rocker. When she relays the memory, her mother corrects her, telling her that it had happened to Louise, not Ary. Ary’s response is intense: “And I, who had felt the stab and swell of the pain in the personal exactitude of remembered experience, knew that she was right, it had been Louise; and I knew a wild grief of heart” (141). Ary later steals the chair in an unconscious desire to reclaim her place in the family by eliminating the sort of terrifying lacunae represented by her mis-remembrance. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, for example, argues that “from the moment Amos begins to talk, the incipient tragedy turns into rueful humor” (ES 42). This challenge to tradition is heralded in the novel by a cleverly self-conscious jab at the literary conventions that had informed Spencer’s earlier work so fully: Kerney Woolbright, an aspiring politician, responds to protagonist Duncan Harper’s observation that he has never seen a lynching by stating that “I never did either . . . All I know is what I read in William Faulkner” (101). Thus, not only does Spencer move away from the distinctly Faulknerian voice she had appropriated in her first two novels, but she overtly, if playfully, suggests that an authentic rendering of southern identity might exist outside the Faulknerian model. As had always been the case for Spencer, the authority of FugitiveAgrarians was not limited to their literary influence, but was also evident in their ongoing support of her career. One need look no further than the front page of The Voice at the Back Door to trace some of Spencer’s many debts and influences: she dedicated the novel to the editor David Clay and his wife Justine Clay, just as Robert Penn Warren had done ten years earlier in his own famous novel of southern politics, All the King’s Men. Tinker is, of course, Duncan’s “second choice” as a partner, but their marriage is revealing of their shared need for a stable home. Tinker is an apparent anomaly in Lacey in that she is a child of divorced parents, and she feels marked by this sense of dislocation well into adulthood. As a result, she displays an exaggerated dedication to domestic serenity, adopting a distinctly passive posture at home—often quite literally: Duncan notes that “every time in life that he came upon Tinker she had contrived to get herself below knee level”—and in public—she adopts the role of a political candidate’s wife by dressing “too carefully in navy and white, even to navy and white pumps,” for example (65, 289). While she has no evident female friends, men universally adore Tinker, although they cannot seem to identify a quality—such as wit or beauty—that is the source of their attraction; quite clearly, she represents a return to a lost tradition, reflexively reassuring men of their unquestioned authority.

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40. Some of the novel’s most astute critics have remarked on the stereotypical nature of the novel’s major characters. For example, Thomas Haddox goes so far as to identify them as “formulaic, predictable, and often laughable” (568). He views this not as an artistic failing, but rather as a means of engaging in “a fairly straightforward and parodic deconstruction of the southern racial order” (569). While I find Haddox’s argument compelling, in my reading of the novel, I see the simplicity of the characters as deceptive. 41. It’s interesting to note that Duncan’s son, Cotton, ref lects the anxiety that Duncan is unable to articulate. In the scene in the woods in which Duncan abandons Cotton for his tryst with Marcia Mae, Duncan causes Cotton to tear up after he speaks sharply to him. We are told that “the child tried hard not to cry, and finally succeeded. They often said to him on such occasions, ‘Be a man, don’t cry.’ He now said this to himself and it worked” (126). Thus, just as Duncan defies the expectations of the stoic patriarch through an extramarital affair, we see Cotton embracing these principles, and the hypocrisy inherent in this construction of manhood is underscored . This fissure between manhood as it is imagined and as it exists is further made manifest when, on their way home, “Duncan shot his gun twice to amuse [Cotton]” (130). This gesture of phallic potency is a diminished one, a performed act of masculinity intended to amuse rather than to assert real authority. 42. Another irony apparent here, of course, is the courthouse scene’s inversion of the massacre a generation before, a fact that is treated in great depth by most of the novel’s critics. 43. Acey’s name, just one letter removed from Lacey, suggests the ways in which his act of racial hatred is tied to the community’s history and the racism that continues to pervade it. 44. Duncan never fully articulates his larger political beliefs. Instead, they are expressed most succinctly by Tinker, who says that Kerney (and, presumably, Duncan) thinks the day of the liberal is at hand. He thinks all you have to do is get a few people in a few towns to take a great risk of being martyrs, only it will seem like a bigger risk than it actually is because people know deep down but won’t admit that the old reactionary position of the South has played out to nothing but a lot of sentiment. He thinks the Dixiecrat movement was the last gasp of it. (33) 45. Specifically, her comments to Kerney echo Duncan’s earlier dismissal of her comment that her brother’s death made things easier for her family: “If everybody knows things like that, what’s the good in saying them?” (190).

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Chapter  1. Spencer’s fears were not unfounded. The Light in the Piazza initially appeared in The New Yorker, which had rejected the manuscript once outright and then, upon receiving a revised submission from Spencer, requested further changes. A July 29, 1959, letter from Roger Angell, the legendary New Yorker editor, stresses the magazine’s enthusiasm for the work, but also expresses concerns about the novella’s ambiguity and length. He urges Spencer, “[P]lease, if you have any acceptance of our point of view and any enthusiasm for attempting a new speculative revision, see whether you can’t sacrifice some lines in the interest of comparative brevity” (Spencer Collection NLC). Ultimately, in a nearly unprecedented move, the magazine dedicated sixty-six pages to the novella in its June 18, 1960, issue. Ironically, despite this shared anxiety, The Light in the Piazza became one of Spencer’s best-known works. It was released in book form both in America and abroad, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1961, was made into an MGM movie starring Olivia de Havilland and George Hamilton in 1962, and was adapted as a musical by the composer and lyricist Adam Guttel in 2003. [In an interesting note, more than forty years after its original publication, The New Yorker once again praised Spencer’s novella in its glowing review of the musical’s Chicago production (Lahr 88–89)]. The novella’s influence is still felt in the literary world as well: Jane Hamilton, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1993, recently published a novel entitled When Madeline Was Young (2006), which she notes was inspired by The Light in the Piazza. Hamilton’s novel explores the consequences of a young wife who, after a traumatic brain injury, reverts to the mind of a seven-year-old. 2. The reliance of binaries associated with the Fugitive-Agrarians is echoed in contemporary southern studies and is, many argue, central to southern identity. In his introduction to South to a New Place, Richard Gray argues that “setting ‘the one’ against ‘the other’ was and still is commonplace in southern self-fashioning” (xvi). He lists a set of “familiar series of oppositions”: “ ‘southern’ versus ‘American’/‘northern’ . . . = place versus placelessness = past versus pastlessness = realism versus idealism = community versus isolation” (xvi). 3. See Davidson, Southern Writers in the Modern World, 57. 4. In an email to the author, Spencer notes that “it naturally still aches a bit that he dismissed me after The Voice at the Back Door. He became more and more obsessive about segregation. However, he did cooperate in giving a reporter from the Nashville Tennessean an interview about me, and used some portion of The Light in the Piazza in a textbook, so maybe he was to some extent forgiving” (Canada). 5. Although Rusher did have limited ties to Montreal, they were not as strong as his connections to Cornwall, England. “John’s mother’s

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7.

8.

9.

10.

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family had originally been early New England settlers, but at the time of the American Revolution had moved north to Canada and were among the founding fathers of St. John, New Brunswick. One grandmother had married an Anglican cleric and so returned to England” (Landscapes 314). John’s sister had returned to Montreal and lived there for several years before Spencer and Rusher moved there. Spencer’s memoir and most of her interviews are consistent in their accounts of her leave-taking. However, in a 1974 interview with Gordon Weaver, she said, “One critic said that I was self-exiled. I thought that was the most overly-important, inflated word to use for having married an Englishman that I’d ever heard in my life. No, I never intended to leave the South at all” (51). Spencer’s comments here are revealing on a number of levels, and speak to an ambivalence in her identity as a southerner. Despite Spencer’s repeated dismissals of a connection between the novel and Henry James’s work, the parallels between the two are often mined by the novella’s critics. For example, in her essay “Elizabeth Spencer,” Elsa Nettles effectively explores the stylistic connections between The Light in the Piazza and James’s work (84–85); in her study Elizabeth Spencer, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw makes an insightful comparison between Margaret Johnson and Spencer Brydon in “The Jolly Corner” (70); and in a short essay entitled “Elizabeth Spencer’s Two Italian Novellas,” Hilton Anderson attempts to debunk connections between The Light in the Piazza and the Jamesian marriage plot (25–30). Clara’s relationship to southern womanhood is a complex one: on one hand, she remains childlike, and thus is exempted from many communal expectations (or, alternately, we may argue that her infantilization represents their extreme). Yet her public enactment of sexual urges complicates this fact. In her study The Belle Gone Bad, Betina Entzminger posits the femme fatale as the binary opposition to the southern lady. As a woman whose sexuality cannot be repressed, Clara somewhat improbably fits Entzminger’s model of the femme fatale, or “bad belle.” See, e.g., Kathryn Lee Siedel’s essay, “Madonna of the Marketplace: Art and Economics in Elizabeth Spencer’s The Light in the Piazza.” In an interesting tangent, Spencer has recalled that the event was based on an actual occurrence, writing, “Odd to remember, I was with Allen Tate, who was then sojourning in Rome and had come to Florence to attend some Roman Catholic conference. A small antique cannon, brought to signal [a soccer] game’s opening, fired unexpectedly and a man near it was burned with powder” (“One Writer’s Sense of Place” 64). That Tate was looking over Spencer’s shoulder as the original cannon exploded may suggest that he (and

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the rest of the southern literary establishment) would be looking on as she exploded—or at least challenged—the southern canon. Chapter  1. Omitted from this list is Spencer’s 1965 work Knights and Dragons, which was originally submitted as part of a short story collection but later was published as a freestanding novella. Like The Light in the Piazza, it is set in Italy. 2. Spencer “moves away” from Faulkner both literally and spiritually. In a letter to her friend Gertrude Hooker dated April 2, 1981, Spencer writes, “I am invited to speak at the Faulkner conference in Oxford, but haven’t had a clue as to what I can say. I actually haven’t read Faulkner in years and don’t know now if I even could go back” (Spencer Collection NLC). If Faulkner’s influence had haunted Spencer early in her career, she clearly seems to have escaped his sway by the 1980s. 3. In identifying publication dates for Spencer’s collections, I am guided by two bibliographic essays, “An Elizabeth Spencer Checklist, 1948 to 1976,” by Laura Barge, and “Abundant Years: An Elizabeth Spencer Checklist, 1976–1992,” by Catherine E. Lewis. In determining the range of publication dates for stories included in Ship Island and Other Stories, I am also taking into account Spencer’s explanation that “When we were still in Rome, an editor at The New Yorker had written to know if I had any short stories I might want to submit to the magazine . . . I dusted one off that the magazine had rejected back in the 1940s [‘The Little Brown Girl’]. It was accepted, so I wrote another [‘The Eclipse’], also accepted” (Landscapes 317). These dates are confirmed in her preface to the collection. 4. The absence of scholarly work done on Jack of Diamonds as a coherent work is surprising. While there are a number of thoughtful reviews of the collection (see Madison Smartt Bell’s September 1988 review in the New York Times Book Review and Robert Phillips’s review in the October 1988 issue of America), on the whole the collection has been overlooked, save for a brief treatment in Terry Roberts’s chapter on Spencer’s short fiction in Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer. 5. Bhabha’s description of the collision between the world and the home is echoed in the work of a number of cultural geographers, including James Clifford, whose essay “Diasporas” is widely cited in a discussion of “dwelling in displacement.” In my treatment of Jack of Diamonds, I rely on Bhabha’s construction of the unhomely moment specifically because of the inherent fluidity Bhabha recognizes in this term, one that is clearly illustrated in his reading of the work of James and Morrison, both American authors. 6. This shift away from “place” is also evident in the fact that Spencer has arranged the stories in Jack of Diamonds based on their publication

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date rather than their setting. Her thinking on this issue presumably follows the same line as it had when she determined the order of The Stories seven years earlier. As she noted in a May 27, 1979, letter to her editor at Doubleday, Blair Brown, As for arrangement I talked this over with a critic who is also a friend and he thought that the geographical idea I had at first (that is, SOUTH, then ITALY, then ELSEWHERE) was not a good one. “In the first place,” he said, “it gives the misleading idea that you write about places when you actually don’t. Your stories happen places, but they’re not actually about them.” (Emphasis Spencer’s; Spencer Collection NLC) Thus, place qua place is becoming less important in Spencer’s view of her work, and, instead, characters’ perception of place—they ways in which they remember it, idealize it, recreate it—becomes a central concern. 7. Bhabha explains that “the beyond” is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past . . . Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but in the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity; past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the “beyond”: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-dela’—here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth. (Ellipses Bhabha’s; Location of Culture 1) 8. Rosalind describes the family’s living area as bounded by windows “which peaked in an irregular triangle at the top, like something in a modernist church” (84). 9. Interestingly, “the ticking” becomes momentarily palpable in the Piazza della Signoria, the same site that Margaret and Clara Johnson use as a “home base” in The Light in the Piazza. Just as it does in Spencer’s earlier novella, the piazza here suggests a series of polyvalent messages hidden beneath a surface made artificially “interpretable”: while the group happily has its picture taken together in the piazza, Ella Mason identifies the photograph as defining “a period, the end of a phase,” suggesting their troubled nature (55). And in her maturity, the piazza is exposed as both inauthentic and fouled: when Ella Mason revisits Italy thirty years later, Eric warns her to avoid the piazza, telling her, “It’s covered with tourists and pigeon shit” (37). 10. Spencer has linked these characters as well. In her 1988 interview with Irv Broughton, she explains that despite their differences in class and education, Ella Mason and Eileen share a similar “voice”: “They seem

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to me, though two different women, to generally come from the same strata in the South that I know best” (167). 11. In her 1988 interview with Wayne J. Pond, Spencer says that “The Business Venture” is set in 1976, although she acknowledges that “it could be the sixties of course” (144). For further discussion of the relationship between the construction of southern womanhood and race, see Anne Goodwyn Jones’s Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1959–1936, 3–50. In her essay, “Gender, Race, and Allen Tate’s Profession of Letters in the South,” Susan Donaldson also traces the effort to “contain blackness” in order to assert the dominance of white masculinity, extending her discussion to include Renaissance literature (499). 12. As Suzanne Jones points out in her discussion of the story in her book Race Mixing, much of Eileen’s narrative is specifically constructed to avoid this recognition: Jones observes that In part Eileen’s gossip about Nelle and Robin takes the shape of a romance narrative, because the crowd cannot conceive of any other relationship for a man and a woman who spend so much time together . . . But also Eileen’s narrative assumes this shape for personal reasons, because she unconsciously needs to ruin Nelle’s reputation in order to safeguard her own marriage to Charlie, who is a first-class womanizer. (282–83) In other words, by focusing of Nelle’s racial transgressions, Eileen can distract herself from Charlie and Nelle’s potential sexual transgressions. Thus, although Eileen often distances herself from the views of her more conservative friends, we see that her understanding of home is equally challenged, and that she is experiencing a form of domestic anxiety that is even more immediate than that articulated by her friends. Chapter  1. Spencer’s tendency to elide or diminish difficult experiences in her memoir is often noted by Landscapes of the Heart’s reviewers. For example, in her review of the memoir Sarah Harrison Smith bemoans Spencer’s “well-mannered” distance from her subject matter, and in an essay on contemporary memoirs, Carolyn Heilbrun notes that while “ ‘place and time’ are evoked in enormous, telling detail” in Landscapes of the Heart, “[Spencer’s] personal story is barely related, inserted only where some explanation of her movements is required” (par. 6, 38). Interestingly, both of these reviews see Spencer’s memoir as explicitly gendered. Smith, for example, attributes what she identifies as Landscapes’ relative flatness to “ladylike politeness” (par. 5). Heilbrun, on the other hand, finds that Spencer’s reluctance to share

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“why she suffered because she was a daughter, a woman, a gifted student, and writer” functions to “[eliminate Landscapes] as woman’s memoir” (emphasis Heilbrun’s; 39, 37). Heilbrun sees Landscapes, then, as a return to the long-standing tradition of male autobiography that defined by “public achievement” rather than personal accounts of female experience (35). These competing readings of Spencer’s work as gendered—as either too ladylike or as adopting distinctly masculine traits—raise a number of interesting questions about the ways in which Spencer’s nonfiction work deviates sharply from the trajectory of her fiction. While Spencer discusses her early struggles with her father at some length in Landscapes of the Heart, she does not address their later relationship. Her letters, in particular those to her friend Gertrude Hooker, reveal that her relationship with her father continued to trouble her and that, in the years leading up to his death, Luther regularly revised his will as a means of articulating his approval of, or displeasure with, his children’s choices. Three years before he died, he all but wrote Spencer out of his will [Letter to Gertrude Hooker, February 16, 1973 (Spencer Collection)]. Ultimately the will was once again revised, and, after years of litigation, Luther Spencer’s estate was split three ways, between Spencer, her brother, and a favored cousin. It should be noted here that Spencer’s perspective of Vietnam is relatively unconventional as well since she was living in Montreal during the war. However, as she explains in a 1990 interview with Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, she “heard a great many stories” while living there about Americans who had gone “underground” and had a friend who actively supported exiled members of the antiwar movement (“The South and Beyond” 200). In an essay on Spencer, Max Steele also notes that in the years before she wrote The Night Travellers, Spencer “[read] everything she [could] about the sixties,” and Spencer’s papers reveal that she consulted authorities as diverse as the noted civil rights attorney William Kunstler and the poet Allen Ginsberg (173, Spencer Collection NLC). In response to a query from the author, Spencer explained that she developed a friendship with Ginsberg while serving on a committee for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, “and from several conversations must have gleaned insights, the way one does when not asking for specifics, but gaining impressions” (“Hello”). Thus, Spencer’s exposure to Vietnam Era culture was both wide-ranging and somewhat extraordinary. Brinkmeyer’s assertion here is supported by the fact that many of the most insightful studies of In Country neglect to identify Mason as a “southern writer.” See, e.g., Katherine Kinney’s treatment of the novel in Friendly Fire: American Images of the Vietnam War. Spencer further underscores the complex mélange of home that Mary and Jeff attempt to create by suggesting that both bring fragmentary notions of home to their relationship. Just as Mary’s understanding of

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home is informed by her experiences in Kate’s duplex, which Spencer describes as “half of an old house” in Kingsbury, Jeff is also from a home that quite literally has been bisected: a fire has destroyed much of his family’s home and, from the time he was ten until he left for college, he lived in what he thinks of as a “half house” (27, 52). Thus, Spencer seems to propose that neither Jeff nor Mary has had access to a “complete” notion of home.

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Inde x

Angell, Roger, 188n1 Belhaven College, 24, 179n8, 181–182n20 “The Beyond,” 120, 191n7 Bhabha, Homi, 13, 102, 114–115, 141, 142, 190n5 See also “The Beyond;” Third Space; Unhomeliness Bloom, Harold, 31, 181n17 Brooks, Cleanth, 26 Brown, Blair, 190–191n6 Cavalier ideal, 19, 20–21, 23, 178–179n6 See also Masculinity; Elizabeth Spencer, Works Clay, David, 50, 88, 186n38 Clifford, James, 190n5 Compson, Quentin, 35, 38, 39–40, 44, 66, 90, 172–173, 183n25, 183n26, 188n3 Davidson, Donald, 5, 24, 25–31, 44, 50–51, 81, 90, 179–180n9, 184n31 autochthonous ideal, 29–31, 39–40, 79–80, 91 as mentor to Spencer, 26, 28–29, 180–181n14, 188n4 and race, 29–31, 181n16 “Why the Modern South Has a Great Literature,” 29, 39, 40 See also Elizabeth Spencer, Works: Fire in the Morning and The Voice at the Back Door

Donaldson, Susan, 27, 192n11 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 154–155, 172 Eliot, T.S., 25 Faulkner, William, 1, 3, 7, 9, 28, 44, 46, 81, 83, 90, 111–112, 173, 190n2 depiction of women, 180n13 as influence on Spencer, 33–35, 53, 175n2, 182n23, 183n25, 184–185n32, 186n37 personal connections to Spencer, 182–183n24 See also Elizabeth Spencer, Works; Quentin Compson Forster, E.M., 175n2 French, Warren, 111–112 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 85 Fugitive-Agrarians, 5, 8, 9, 16, 25–28, 39, 81, 83, 84–85, 88, 177n12, 179–181n9–14, 184n31, 188n2 and influence on Spencer, 31–33, 50–51, 63, 186n38 and race, 181n16; See also Donald Davidson and race and women, 26–28, 34, 46, 180n12–14 See also Donald Davidson; Andrew Lytle; John Crowe Ransom; Southern Renaissance; Allen Tate; Robert Penn Warren

204

INDEX

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, 31 Glasgow, Ellen, 8, 28, 176–177n8, 181n18 Gordon, Caroline, 28, 180–181n14, 182–183n25 The History of Southern Women’s Literature, 8–9 History of Southern Literature, 8, 9, 175n3 Hobson, Fred, 51, 142, 176n6 Hoffman, Frederick, 10 Holman, Hugh, 176n5 I’ll Take My Stand, 26–27 James, Henry, 91, 175, 114, 189n7, 190n5 Jones, Anne Goodwyn, 178–179n6, 192n11 King, Richard, See “Southern family romance” Kreyling, Michael, 6–7, 8, 9, 175n3, 176n6–7 Lytle, Andrew, 25, 51, 90 Mansfield, Katherine, 31, 34 Martin, Biddy and Chandra Mohanty, 99 Masculinity, 19–24 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 154, 193n4 McCain, John Sidney (grandfather), 19–20, 33 McCain, John Sidney III (cousin), 178n4 McCain, Joseph (uncle), 19–20, 22 McCullers, Carson, 46, 176–177n8 McDill, James Moody, 24–25 Morrison, Toni, 114, 176–177n8, 190n5 “New Southern Studies,” 10–11, 177n11

The New Yorker, 188n1, 190n3 O’Connor, Flannery, 8, 34, 46, 176–177n8, 180–181n14 Percy, Walker, 111, 152 Phillips, Robert, 182n21, 190n4 Porter, Katherine Anne, 28, 32, 180–181n14 Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, 11, 43, 66, 83–84, 92, 182n23, 184–185n32, 186n36, 189n7 Ransom, John Crowe, 25–26, 28, 131, 179–180n9, 184n31 Roberts, Elizabeth Madox, 28 Roberts, Terry, 11, 60, 62, 78, 163, 175n2, 184–185n32, 190n4 Rubin, Louis, 10, 151, 176n5, 176n5, 181n20 “The Southern Writer and the Faraway Country,” 90–91 “Rubin Generation,” 5–6, 175n3 See also History of Southern Literature Rusher, John (husband), 90, 188–189n5 Scott, Sir Walter, 20, 178n5 Simpson, Lewis, 5, 175n3 “Southern family romance,” 16, 178n1 Southern Literature notion of “community” in, 17–18 notion of “home” in, 3–4, 11–14, 18 notion of “place” in, 6, 9–11, 172n9, 177n9 traditional constructions of, 1, 5–14 trope of exiled southerner in, 90–91

INDEX

use of binaries to define, 85, 91, 93–94, 188n2 women’s writing in, 7–9 Southern Renaissance, 3, 8–9, 16, 28, 34, 49, 184n28, 192n11 See also Fugitive-Agrarians; “Southern family romance” Spencer, Elizabeth childhood of, 16, 18–24 race and, 21–22 education of, See Belhaven College and Vanderbilt University focus on short stories, 112 European travel of, 86–87, 89–90 marriage of, See John Rusher move to Canada, 90–91 return to the South, 151–153 Works: Short Stories: “The Business Venture,” 113, 141–149 race in, 142, 144–149, 192n11, 192n12 “The Cousins,” 113, 123, 130–138 incest as response to disorientation in, 132, 133–34 Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry in, 131, 137 southern manhood in, 131, 134, 135 “Jack of Diamonds,” 123–130 home as maternal space in, 124, 129–130 “Jean-Pierre,” 113, 115–123, 136, 166 Emily Dickinson’s poetry in, 118–123 “First Dark,” 1–3, 15

205

“The Girl Who Loved Horses,” 15 “The Skater,” 113, 138–141 “A Southern Landscape,” 17, 146 “The White Azalea,” 15 Novellas and Books: Fire in the Morning, 12, 15, 33–53, 61, 63, 64, 70, 83, 88, 182n23 anxiety of “Other-ness” in, 37–39, 41–45, 49–50 Donald Davidson’s response to, 50–51 Faulkner as influence in, 33–35 Female Community in, 45–49, 183n27 masculine aesthetic in, 35–36 privileging of male experience in, 35–36, 45–46, 184n28 race in, 33–34 Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories, 13, 113–149, 173, 190n4, 190–191n6; See also individual story titles Knights and Dragons, 190n1 Landscapes of the Heart, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 88, 151, 152, 178n2, 192–193n1, 193n2 The Light in the Piazza (novella), 4, 12–13, 83–110, 111, 112, 113, 142, 149, 173, 175n2, 188n1, 188n4, 189n7, 190n1, 191n9 adaptation as a film, 188n1 adaptation as musical, 4–5, 188n1

206

INDEX

Spencer, Elizabeth—Continued as challenge to the southern canon, 109–110, 189–190n10 fluidity of identity in, 105–110 as “intermediary” work, 83–85 masculine authority as hollow in, 100–101 money and identity in, 104–105 Piazza della Signoria as contested space, 94–96, 191n9 restricted agency of women in, 97–99 Marilee, 113 The Night Travellers, 5, 13–14, 153–173, 193n3 Belle in, 157, 162 mother-daughter relationships in, 166–168, 170–171 names as reflective of self-fashioning, 162, 168 reconciliation in, 170–173 No Place for an Angel, 111 The Salt Line, 111 Ship Island and Other Stories, 113, 190n3 The Snare, 84, 111 The Southern Woman, 4, 15 The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer, 32, 113, 179n8, 181–182n20, 190–191n6 This Crooked Way, 12, 15, 50–63, 64, 83 and connections to Absalom! Absalom!, 53, 56, 61, 184–185n32 Faulkner as influence in, 53, 184–185n32 marriage as means of redefining home in, 55–59, 62–63

privileging of male experience in, 51–52 self-exile in, 54–55 The Voice at the Back Door, 12, 15, 51–53, 63–81, 83, 86–89, 142, 184–185n32, 186n38 Donald Davidson’s rejection of, 88–89, 188n4 Faulkner as waning influence in, 186n37 privileging of male experience in, 52 race in, 63, 73–75, 80–81 social exile in, 76, 78 stoic model, waning power of, 70–71, 187n41 Essays: “Emerging as a Writer in Faulkner’s Mississippi,” 34, 178n2 “One Writer’s Sense of Place,” 189–190n10 Spencer, Luther, 22–24, 26, 86–88, 152, 179n7, 193n2 Spencer, Mary (mother), 20–21, 23 Tate, Allen, 3, 5, 25, 26–28, 88, 90, 179–180n9, 180–181n14, 181nn15, 16, 182–183n24, 189–190n10 “Backward Glance,” See “New Provincialism” “The New Provincialism,” 2–3, 8 Taylor, Peter, 179–180n9, 180–181n14 Third Space, 91, 99, 106 Till, Emmett, 87 Unhomeliness, 114, 117–123, 128–130, 133–138, 140–142, 146–149 Vanderbilt University, 5, 16, 24–25, 179–180n9

INDEX

See also Donald Davidson Vietnam War in literature, 153–155 Warren, Robert Penn, 3, 5, 25, 51, 87, 90, 186n38, 187n41 Welty, Eudora, 5, 8, 44, 181n19, 181–182n20 as influence, 175n2

207

as mentor figure, 31–32, 179n8, 181n18 “Place in Fiction,” 9–10, 148 Woolf, Virginia, 31, 34 Yeager, Patricia, 7–8, 9, 176–177nn7, 8, 177n10