[In the following essay, Blythe and Sweet discuss the universal Grail myth and how it relates to the short story “Shiloh.”]

Bobbie Ann Mason is often viewed as a minimalist, a contemporary school of fiction not without detractors. As Barbara Henning notes, “many critics … are suspicious of [minimalist] stories because of the lack of metaphoric depth” (690). Henning then refutes these critics by demonstrating in “Shiloh” that Mason employs synecdochic details (e.g., Leroy's body, the truck, crafts, kits, birds, and trade names) to create “a metaphoric frame for comparison and reflection” (690).

Mason not only employs these details, but, we contend, she undergirds “Shiloh” with a more complex, unified pattern. More specifically, Mason, in the tradition of such twentieth-century American writers as Eliot, Malamud, and Cheever, structures her story around one of the major archetypes in Western culture, the Grail myth. Ultimately, this myth lends universal significance to the seemingly minutiae-laden lives of a twentieth-century western Kentucky couple in a troubled marriage, emphasizing by contrast the gap between what used to be and what ambiguously remains today.

Mason quickly establishes the Moffitts' situation as a contemporary version of what Jessie Weston, author of the definitive study of the Grail myth, From Ritual to Romance, calls the “Waste Land.” Weston claims this desolate condition is “in some manner, not clearly explained, connected with the death of a knight whose name and identity are never disclosed” (12–13). As Mason's title suggests, Shiloh, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War where many identity-less Southern and Northern knights fell, looms in the story's background. Death and desolation permeate the Moffitts' existence. Early on, Leroy “notices how much the town has changed. Subdivisions are spreading across western Kentucky like an oil slick” (3). Mason reinforces this lethal image later in the story by connecting the proliferation of subdivisions with the bloody battleground. When the Moffitts visit Shiloh, they stand appropriately in a graveyard: “The cemetery, a green slope dotted with white markers, looks like a subdivision site” (15). When Leroy meets his marijuana connection, Mason again stresses death, noting the drug-dealing kid “lives in one of those expensive subdivisions in a new white-columned brick house that looks like a funeral parlor” (4). Mason more intimately relates the Moffitts to this deadly landscape by noting that 15 years earlier, at the beginning of their marriage, their son, Randy, died of sudden infant death syndrome. Also in the past, Norma Jean's father died of a perforated ulcer (after a honeymoon trip to the pervasive Shiloh). Out the window sits Leroy's truck, unmoving, a mechanical tombstone marking the death of the Moffitt marriage.

Weston also believes that the Waste Land is often tied to the condition of the land's ruler, a figure she calls the “Fisher King”: “the personality of the King, the nature of the disability under which he is suffering, and the reflex effect exercised upon his folk and his land, correspond” (114). Weston elaborates upon this disability, describing the king as “suffering from infirmity caused by wounds, sickness, or old age” (20). Mason clearly indicates that Leroy Moffitt is her contemporary version of the Fisher King. Reading a book about another century, Norma Jean explains to Leroy, “Your name means ‘the King’” (13). Leroy (French le roi: king) certainly suffers from a wound. A truckdriver, Leroy has recently been in an accident: “his tractor-trailer jackknifed in Missouri, badly twisting his left leg in its socket. He has a steel pin in his hip” (1). Now when he walks, Leroy must hobble. Weston also notes that the Fisher King often suffers “the loss of virility” (23). Not only did his first son die, but Leroy and Norma Jean have not been able to produce another child.

The most important aspect of Leroy's debilitated condition is the deteriorating status of his marriage. Since his accident, his relationship with Norma Jean has reached an unsettling stasis. He sits around home making Popsicle stick log cabins, snapping together model kits, puffing joints, and doing needlepoint instead of searching for a new job. Meanwhile, Norma Jean tries to better herself by lifting weights, taking an English course at a local community college, cooking exotic foods, and learning to play the electric organ. In short, Norma Jean seems disappointed that her truckdriver is home, Leroy is unhappy, “they sometimes feel awkward around each other” (2), and they never speak about their dead child. However, when Mabel relates the story of a child killed by a dachshund, they both exhibit guilt. Mason's objective correlative for their marriage is the Body Buddies Norma Jean leaves in her cereal bowl; Leroy and Norma Jean are like “the soggy tan balls floating in a milk puddle” (7).

Like traditional Grail heroes, Leroy eventually decides to set off on a perilous quest. As Weston explains, sometimes “the hero sets out on his journey with no clear idea of the task before him” (12). Appropriately, Leroy knows he “must create a new marriage, start afresh” (3), but he “is not sure what to do next” (1). He first plans to build a full-scale log house for them, but Norma Jean resists his scheme. As a result, “He knows he is going to lose her” (11).

At this moment of despair, Leroy is aided by the traditional helper whom Weston and Carl Jung call the wise old man—aka the savior, redeemer, guru. This figure usually appears, according to Jung, when the hero is in “a hopeless desperate situation … the knowledge needed to compensate the deficiency comes in the form of a personified thought, i.e., in the shape of the sagacious and helpful old man” (217). Or, in this story, a woman. Mabel Beasley, Leroy's mother-in-law and an elderly widow, is a spinner-creator (she makes them a dust ruffle), a moral censor (she criticizes the couple for Norma Jean's getting pregnant before marriage and Norma Jean herself for smoking and cursing), and an advisor. From the beginning this woman of “worn face that has the texture of crinkled cotton” (12) understands Leroy's problem: “You don't know what to do with yourself—that's the whole trouble” (6). In her very first appearance she advises the couple to journey to Shiloh, a hallowed ground both for the South and Mabel (she honeymooned there). In her second visit she reiterates to Leroy that Shiloh is “so full of history … You do what I said. A little change is what she needs” (13).

Fittingly this journey begins on a sacred day, Sunday. Mabel, having prodded them into departure, refuses to go along because the Moffitts must make the journey alone. Weston explains that another key figure on this journey is female: “it is invariably a maiden who directs the hero on his road to the Grail castle, or reproaches him for his failure there” (169). Norma Jean drives the injured Leroy to and through Shiloh. When Leroy finds the battleground not what he expected (he thought it would look like a golf course), Norma Jean points out his problems, starting with his ridiculous scheme to build a log house. Mainly she emphasizes the failure of their marriage, explaining that she wants to leave him. When he counters that they could start over, she rebuts him with “We have started all over again” (15). Appropriately, this reproach, the nadir of the Moffitts' marriage, takes place in a cemetery. Weston elaborates that the quest often reached a crucial moment at either the Perilous Chapel or the Perilous Cemetery, the latter of which “is surrounded by the ghosts of knights slain in the forest, and buried in unconsecrated ground” (178). Having passed through “the thick clusters of trees” (13), the Moffitts stand among “the white slabs in a graveyard” (15), where Leroy tries to focus on the fact that some 3,500 blue and gray knights died.

According to Weston, one task of the Grail hero is to inquire into the nature of the Grail. In Mason's vision the modern-day Grail is, as has been suggested, marriage. At the same cemetery Leroy begins to ask the right questions about his and Norma Jean's relationship:

—“Didn't I promise to be home from now on?” (15)

—“What did I do wrong?” (15)

—“Is this one of those women's lib things?” (15)

—“What are you talking about?” (15)

With the proper questions comes the hero's epiphany. Leroy finally realizes that “the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him” (16). This insight is a progression consistent with his earlier revelation that “he never took time to examine anything” (2). He becomes aware at the graveyard that his scheme to build a log house has been merely a plan to construct the shell of a marriage: “building a house out of logs is similarly empty” (16), for his marriage is dead.

In Weston's Grail myth the hero is a success or failure, worthy or unworthy. This ending is often mirrored in nature; the sky, the river, and trees are often symbols of regeneration. Mason uses these elements, but not definitively, for in the twentieth century the answers are not always clear-cut. At the moment of Leroy's epiphany, Norma Jean literally leaves him, walking away so as to add physical distance to the psychic distance already between them. His eyes open, Leroy follows her through the cemetery along the archetypal “serpentine brick path” (16); since the garden of Eden, the snake has suggested forbidden yet necessary knowledge. However, his leg, in no better shape than his marriage, “still hurts him” (16)—i.e., the maimed king has not been healed. At the end of Mason's story, the hero and the lady are not united. Norma Jean stands “far away” (16) on a bluff overlooking the Tennessee River. The rebirth of their marriage verges on possibility, but is not a fait accompli. The story's last ambiguity is Norma Jean's final gesture: is it a wave good-bye or is Norma Jean beckoning to Leroy? Mason's Grail symbols don't tell us. The river is flowing, but in the distance. The couple is neither immersed in it nor travelling upon it; they stand on the precipice of possibility. The sky is not blue with the purity of a new day for the land, but “unusually pale” (16), the color (off-white) of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed.

Mason, then, makes Leroy Moffitt trace the traditional path of the Grail quest. From the maimed king to the Perilous Cemetery, many of the Grail trappings are present. Thus, “Shiloh” transcends its minimalist labeling by using the universality of the Grail myth to suggest the lack of certainty in modern-day relationships.

Works Cited

Henning, Barbara. “Minimalism and the American Dream: ‘Shiloh’ by Bobbie Ann Mason and ‘Preservation’ by Raymond Carver.” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (1989): 689–98.

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. Shiloh, and Other Stories. New York: Harper, 1983.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1957.