[In the following essay, Pollack examines Mason's role as a southern literary figure, and asserts that Feather Crowns cemented Mason's place as a noted women's historian.]

What will it be like to read Bobbie Ann Mason's Shiloh a century from now? Will her specific allusions to the contemporary—to pop music, to brand names, to the backdrop of Kroger's and K-Mart—require a reader to grope and imagine a way towards a particular, not fully recoverable past? Will that future reading reveal Mason's fiction as more accurately described by the term “historical” than by “contemporary,” uncovering an unlikely generic resemblance to Edith Wharton's fiction: that is, to fiction that captures a specific culture, still vaguely familiar, but so specifically of a particular time and place—fashionable New York in the early twentieth century or small-town America in the 1980s—that it is also “historical,” evoking the details, habits, conflicts, and anxieties of a historical moment?

Shiloh, the historical place name that entitles Mason's first collection, introduces characters inattentive to “the insides of history” (16), who have for the most part even overlooked the “historical” battles in which they themselves have engaged. And while those perhaps postmodern characters experience history as unknowable, Mason is as interested in history as that other, more obviously “historical” author who has used the title Shiloh, Shelby Foote. The conception of history with which each works, however, is entirely different. Foote writes about official history in his Shiloh, although he writes from an unofficial point of view and hopes by doing so to reveal the insides of that history. One of his characters observes that most official histories are omniscient “books about war … written to be read by God Almighty, because no one but God ever saw it that way.” This squadsman, Robert Winter, reasonably proposes that history should be another sort of project, the sort in which Foote himself engages. “A book about war, to be read by men, ought to tell what each of the twelve of us saw in our own little corner. Then it would be the way it was—not to God but to us” (164). Foote's project, marked by the twentieth-century emphasis on point of view in history as well as narrative, is nonetheless about official history, and so it is easily placed in Southern literary tradition. By contrast, Mason's fit in that tradition is less obvious. This indistinct fit is not peculiar to Mason: she is not the only Southern woman writer who might seem to be ahistorical, but who, on second glance, has another conception of what constitutes an interest in “history,” seen from a different “little corner.” Mason could be taken as representative of Southern women writers who, largely without anyone noticing, have been transforming Southern literature's characteristic attention to official history. But studies of Southern literature have repeatedly found women writers inattentive to “History” and, in the all-too-recent past, even placed women writers apart, omitting them from the construction of “Southern literature” in defense of a categorizing notion applied with a too-limited sense of what history is. (Barbara Ladd helps me make this point with her recent protest against the persisting tendency to read Eudora Welty as an “ahistorical” writer, a misreading that Ladd suggests has its premises in “gender in general and William Faulkner in particular,” before suggesting that Welty strategically obstructs Faulkner's very male notion of history when she displaces the assumptions of Go Down Moses with those of The Golden Apples.)

Mason, like other Southern women writers, attends history not as Foote and Faulkner have but as women's historians of recent decades have, re-centering it. For them, history is not the chronicle of great deeds and greater battles, borders, treaties, and territories, but an account of lives lived on the margins of official history and culture—of lives silent in history because, by race, class, or gender, they lacked access to official power and event. This new history, like Mason's novel Feather Crowns, contextualizes the prescriptions and taboos of gender behaviors as well as of class and race relationships, locating and examining among other things, sexual mores by focusing on such previously “ahistorical” subject matter as the conventions of childbirth.

A few of Mason's stories obviously look back—for example, “Detroit Skyline, 1949,” “Nancy Culpepper,” and most importantly, In Country. But until her recent novel Feather Crowns, her deep interest in the historical has been partly, perhaps mostly, obscured by her use of the contemporary. Her abiding interest, however, has been and is in periods of cultural/historical change. She writes about transitional periods not only in the lives of her characters, but in the landscape and values of twentieth-century America. R. Z. Sheppard describes her 1980s landscape as “the no longer rural, but not yet suburban, South,” peopled with working class and farm folks, principally of Western Kentucky, south of Paducah, where farms have been replaced by subdivided housing developments, and fields by K-Marts and Krogers. Albert E. Wilhelm describes it as very specifically a culture in flux where old values are all being challenged but, as he demonstrates, alternative identities are not yet clearly in place. Old traditions—and in particular “proper” behaviors and sexual roles—are still present, yet clearly eroded. And so Mason's characters wander out of conventional sexual roles, and they face the bewilderment of moving beyond them. They find it necessary to redefine what it means to be a woman, a daughter, a wife, a mother. Her women have moved beyond the clear gender conceptions with which they were raised and now face the dilemma of saying what should stand in place of those conceptions. Her men and women both confront a very contemporary bewilderment about going forward. “The Retreat” is a title that—in addition to its local meaning, that is, a religious retreat that coincides with a withdrawal from a marriage—has something to do with official history's war strategies as well as the metaphysical problem of how we go forward in a period of bewildering transition. In that story, Georgeann's husband, Shelby Picket (a name that for me now carries amusing evocations of Shelby Foote and General Pickett of the Gettysburg charge—and retreat), finds that his increasingly unpredictable wife has left a retreat workshop on Christian marriage to actively retreat into a video game. Recognizing a threat and danger in her dissatisfaction with their less-than-skillfully played daily life, he asks his wife: “What can I do to make you happy?” Georgeann, “still blasting aliens off a screen in her mind,” doesn't answer at first. When she does, she can only say, “I'll tell you when I get it figured out. … Just let me work on it” (146). This is where Mason's women stand—on the verge of being able to say what will make them happy. What they want is not what they thought. The old certainties and sexual roles they were led to believe they wanted have vanished, and the alternative that will satisfy is not easy to name. As in the line from Shiloh, “something is happening” to them. Dreams and expectations are being revised between generations, but what they should now dream for is not yet settled. Around them, parents or family members—people whom they love from an earlier generation—live with more certainty. They are just as confused, although they are not yet at all perplexed. For example, in “Third Monday,” Ruby's mother insists that her daughter's breast cancer has been caused by “lifting heavy boxes in her job.” “Women,” she continues with disconcerting conviction, “just weren't built to do men's work.” And Ruby despairingly replies with a clarity that brings confusion into focus, “Let's not get into why I never married.” The gap that looms between mother and daughter here measures a historical change.

“Third Monday” is paradigmatic of Mason's early creation of images: not of the perhaps predictable sexual antagonisms of contemporary women's fiction but of awkward sexual transitions occurring during a cultural shift, something slightly different. At a baby shower given by a bowling team for a single mother, ribbons from gifts threaded onto a paper plate make a “traditional” comic bridal bouquet, but discomfortingly “the ends of the ribbons dangle like tentacles on a jellyfish” (233). A member of the team later reveals what the others have suspected: that “she shaves … every morning with a Lady Sunbeam” since “her birth control pills [have] stimulated facial hair” (243). These unsettling images accompany the story of one woman's “third-Monday” intimacy, coming unexpectedly after she has chosen something other than traditional marriage. Ruby has found genuine satisfaction in a mid-life involvement with Buddy Landon, who comes to town each third Monday to sell dogs—creatures that he is fond of but quite able to part with—at a flea market where others sell bric-a-brac, the loosened artifacts of traditional family homes, now dismantled. Between two of Buddy's visits, Ruby has had a mastectomy. She faces the prospect of sharing the news of her cancer with him. She wonders whether he will feel as if his property has been violated but thinks that “Buddy is not that kind of man, and she is not his property” (233). The question that builds throughout the story is: will this improvised relationship withstand the pressure of the personal crisis of breast cancer? As in so many Mason stories set at the end of this century, the characteristics of sexual relationships are in flux, and they are more unknowable and unpredictable than ever while participants live and explore historical change.

Mason's women (and most of her men), while living in historical change, live outside of official history and move, as Diana Fuss has put it, “across and against his story” (95). In Country makes explicit both its young female character's position outside history and her need and desire to imagine her way into understanding the intersections between “herstory” and “history.” In Mason's 1986 interview with Albert Wilhelm, she spoke of her character Sam Hughes' “quest for the experience of the male.” Sam searches to find her dead father in the place where he eludes her while affecting her: that is, official history—the experience of the Vietnam War. Mason connects Sam's search to the quest structure and mystery patterns of the Nancy Drew books that Mason herself loved as a girl:

There's something about that resourcefulness in the female characters in the girl sleuth books that became a quest for the experience of the male—what men and boys experience in our society. That is a great mystery and something we females are not allowed to know about as children or teenagers. There seems to be a great motivation among a lot of women writers to write about this quest for what men experience. In In Country, for example, I have written in terms of Sam wondering what it was like to go to war, that's something that women by and large don't have to do … Why do they do it and not us? What can they tell us about it and what does it mean to us? It's just a source of great mystery.

(Wilhelm, “Interview” 30)

In Mason's 1984 Hopewell, Kentucky, Sam wonders why vets do not have girlfriends. She discovers that neither Agent Orange nor impotence keeps them away from women so profoundly as the fact that women have not shared the male experience of Vietnam (official history). “Women weren't over there … so they can't really understand” (107), Emmett explains. Imagining the vets' daily conversations at McDonald's, she realizes that, indeed, she “doesn't know what men talk about when together. Men were a total mystery” (184). Asking her mother Irene to explain the war and to tell about her father, and then accusing her of protectively refusing, Sam discovers the actual situation. Irene doesn't have more to tell: “I've told you about all there is to tell … I was married to him for one month before he left, and I never saw him again … I hardly even remember him” (167). Irene is not the participant-informant that Sam seeks. But Sam does not believe her mother when Irene attempts to reassure her by saying: “You shouldn't feel bad about any of it. [This Vietnam thing] had nothing to do with you” (57). Sam is certain it “had everything to do with [her]” (71), obliquely realizing that history and herstory intersect. She speculates over the meaning of saved mementos of combat—teeth and ears saved as nostalgic trophies, angrily speculating, “… men wanted to kill. That's what men did, she thought. It was their basic profession. … Women didn't kill. That was why her mother wouldn't honor the flag, or honor the dead. Honoring the dead meant honoring the cause” (209–10). But separateness is not the whole of the story that Sam is constructing. History, she discovers, has partly been motivated by the desire to protect herstory. Emmett “went to Vietnam for [Irene's] sake” although “it wasn't what Irene wanted. Then she got stuck with [him] because of what [he] did for her” (225).

History and herstory are entwined, and Sam—whose name is uncertainly gendered—intertwines her own coming of age with what must have been her father's, structuring a parallel between the unknown dangers he faced in war with those she faces in approaching her own female maturity. Needing to decide if she will join her mother in Lexington and enter a world where her mother hopes “women can do anything they want now, just about” (167), or stay in Hopewell with Emmett, Lonnie, or Tom—men who might define and limit her future—she unpredictably feels that the “stress of the Vietnam War … was her inheritance” (89). Provocatively, her search for the experience of Vietnam is punctuated with counterpoint female dangers that repeatedly surface and submerge: Dawn's unexpected pregnancy and too-easy desire for a teen-aged marriage, her mother's experience as a young single mother (“I was nineteen, not much older than you. Imagine yourself with this little baby. How would you handle it?” 168), thoughts about her mother's new baby—a salvation for Irene but a disturbingly displacing addition for Sam—and not least, Mamaw's limited experience in the world. The female dangers of herstory unconsciously counterpoint those of history. “Dawn was going to have a baby … it was as though Dawn had been captured by body snatchers” (155) as in that movie in which “nobody got saved.” And her mother's baby—“like a growth that had come loose … like a scab or wart” that Irene “carried … around … in fascination, unable to part with it”—reminds her that “in Vietnam, mothers carried their dead babies around until they began to rot” (164). And even while she accuses men of killing in a way that women do not, she admits, “Soldiers murdered babies. But women did too. They ripped their own unborn babies out of themselves and flushed them away, squirming and bloody” (215). At Cawood Pond the frightening Viet Cong soldier she imagines and fears turns out to be a mother raccoon with babies. In the summer of Bruce Springsteen's “Born to Run,” Sam's mind is running between two sets of terrors and making peace with both. She is exploring the conscious and unconscious sources of her stress.

Sam feels strongly that history has been endured by men in part to protect the mothers and children of herstory. But she also discovers history as that which paradoxically alters—and is altering—herstory. When Sam visits her father's parents and feels the distance between their lives and hers, she realizes that “if her father hadn't gone to war, he'd be discussing blue mold … [and she] would be jiggling a baby on her knee” (195). While trying to protect his world for his daughter, Dwayne Hughes has paradoxically changed it, created circumstances that catalyzed change, and so put history as well as death between them.

In Country, then, is about the search for history and about its unknowability as much as Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! is. Arguably it is about the look of history in a postmodern, post-representational era where the impossibility of constructing authoritative history is strongly felt. Sam struggles to picture the past: “I can't really see it,” Sam said. “All I can see in my mind is picture postcards. It doesn't seem real. I can't believe it was really real.” Her reply comes from Tom, who like this novel's other historical informants testifies to history's intense reality while remaining inarticulate about and overwhelmed by that experience. “It was real, all right. You don't want to know how real it was” (95). History is inarticulate and the historian has access to narrative only, recourse not to the past but to texts about the past. In this novel, the self-reproducing narratives that reveal and obscure the past are not the too-fixed variations of official historical narrative that might shape and limit its production and reproduction. Instead they are popular culture's historical narratives—the fictional files of MASH and the images of TV documentaries. These television narratives seem reliable in therapeutic and releasing ways. They make horror over into manageable entertainment, shared and consumed with interest by a nation in need of narrative's power to release and then contain shock, and even transform it into comedy. But they are unreliable in other ways. At Cawood's Pond, imagining “in country,” Sam tries to picture Vietnamese bending over work in rows of rice while the sky is in flames but realizes she can't imagine the landscape accurately. “Did rice grow in rows? Was it bushy, like soybeans?” (212). Soon after, even while rejecting the possibility of adequately responding to Sam's entreaty to “tell about it” (“No point.” Emmett explains. “You can't tell it all …” [222]), Sam's Uncle Emmett reaches into his memory “to tell” to satisfy her need. But his words all sound to Sam like the bits of recognizable old stories, echoing familiar narratives in familiar phrases. “That sounds familiar.” Sam responds. “I saw something like that in a movie on TV. … I heard somebody in that documentary we saw say that” (223). The particularity of Emmett's experience is lost in too-familiar narrative images, in worn phases like “the smell of warm blood in the jungle heat, like soup coming to a boil,” in “the smell of death … like you were eating death.” The words of familiar narratives are not adequate to Emmett's task of self-expression. Her father's letters from the war are not any more satisfying. Mamaw considers them more “personal” (200) than the diary in which he recorded thoughts and actions, but in fact they are formulaic letters from the front, following a paradigm inherited from the genre of love-and-war letters familiar in old Hollywood movies. “They didn't say much, did they?” Emmett agrees. Later, tellingly, Sam remembers her high school graduation ceremony where she received not a diploma but a blank sheet of paper tied with ribbon (200). All the authoritative texts have too much blankness to them.

In the climax of this novel, Emmett tells Sam, “You can't learn from the past. The main thing you learn from history is that you can't learn from history. That's what history is” (226). This line has stimulated readers' discussions and has left Fred Hobson and Robert Brinkmeyer, among others, disturbed by Emmett's lack of “a compelling sense of history” (Brinkmeyer 22). My own reading, however, does not stress Emmett's unreliability here, but his reliability. Emmett accurately expresses the individual's experience of history—that is, the experience of being caught in circumstances you did not count on and couldn't shape, of being caught in circumstances larger than any person's ability to shape them. “I thought I was getting revenge” (221), Emmett tells Sam. History, Emmett now knows, is larger than individual intentions, and it is the thing which cannot be managed with personal choices. In it, individuals' personal choices take them unexpected places and, as often as not, lead to bewilderment rather than self-direction. “Everything's confusing now, looking back,” Sam realizes, “but in a way everything seemed clear back then. Dwayne thought he was doing the right thing, and then Emmett went over there and thought he was doing the right thing … Everybody always thinks they're doing the right thing, you know” (235). History is a current too forceful to permit lives self-direction. “You learn from history … that you can't learn from history. That's what history is”: bumbling through.

Feather Crowns, Mason's recent historical novel, primarily set in the year 1900, is about another moment of cultural transition: the preceding century's turn, the transition into the modern period that has put us where we now are at this long end of the 1900s, caught in another rotation. It perhaps shows us history repeating itself—showing us the shifts that bewildered the century before us. As in her stories set in the late twentieth century, the novel charts historical change by looking at gender and sexual prescriptions and taboos in flux. Those particular arenas of change intersect with all the others that mark and make this century, and the novel form allows Mason to explore cultural change in more complexity than her short fictions. As in the work of Sarah Orne Jewett at the end of the nineteenth century, the quartet of medicine, science, money, and male authority are pictured intersecting women's separate sphere of authority and relationship. As in more recent twentieth-century women's literature, Mason's plot involves living beyond silence and finding a voice. And as in Mason's own earlier work, there is a feeling of being caught in the unsettled confusion of historical as well as personal transition. Christianna Wheeler's narrative pictures the historical changes occurring between 1890 and 1965—religious, scientific, and sexual. The historical changes documented by her story produce a characteristically twentieth-century loss-of-faith as well as a cultural and personal education. This brings me to my central focus—Mason's Feather Crowns and its interests in women's history and historical transition.

We begin on a Kentucky farm outside of Hopewell, with “Christianna Wheeler, big as a bathtub and confined to bed all winter with the heaviness of her pregnancy” (3). Christianna, bewildered by her unexpected size, guiltily fears she is giving birth to devils as a retribution for the degree of sexual pleasure she enjoys in her marriage, or worse, for the ashamed lust awakened in her by a dark-haired preacher of turn-of-the-age apocalyptic prophecy. When we meet her, she is in the process of surprising herself by bearing, not monsters, but five small, perfect, and full-term babies—a wonder of the world—in the farm front room. The narrative of her delivery, of the life and death of those infants, and of the commotion they cause in Christie's world and in the town and nation sidelights historical change and the sort of transitional period we have met before in Mason's work.

With the modern period, an age of spectacle is surfacing. We come to know it through the grotesque crowds that come to see the babies—both living and dead—as eagerly as they assemble to view the gender ambiguity of the breasts and penis on the sideshow hermaphrodite, Charley Lou Pickles. On the tenth day of the Wheeler babies' lives, Christie glances through the window and cries out as she sees “hurrying across the field … an enormous throng of people. Women, holding on to their hats and skirts and stepping high through the muddy pasture. Children, running. Men, striding behind and alongside, like dogs herding a flock” (165). From then on, the impulse of the age is revealed daily—once in the comic but emblematic figure who, having found the door blocked to ensure privacy, steps through the window “just like it was the regular way to get in.” This is a frenzy to see, a twentieth-century hunger that relishes others' lives as entertainment—better entertainment when powerful enough to catalyze genuine reflection on human possibility, tragedy, and nearly inexplicable survival, but nonetheless entertainment easily, and grotesquely, put aside for the savor of next spectacle. This appetite has grown throughout the century as technology improves our capacity to see other lives (the train which brings Christie's crowd is of course only one instrument that has made the world smaller). The craving is now identifiable in television talk shows which pay people to present themselves as characters, to bring forward their family dilemmas, sexual habits, personal obsessions, shameful secrets, and authentic pain for the quick consumption of viewing masses addicted to using other's stories as relief from their own. Then and now, the interest in other's stories is genuine and is as human and as creative as any. But perhaps as access grows, the capacity to hear stories is limited. There is a disturbing disjunction between the satisfaction of the viewers—between the good mood of the entertained spectators—and, as Christie formulates it, “what the amazing snake lady, who was scaly as a perch fish and shed her skin in the spring … thought about her condition” (213).

While this modern age develops, certain companion powers are rising: medicine, science, industry, technology. The traditional woman-craft, the “strong hands and … gentle, reassuring voice” (5) of mid-wife Hattie Hurt are being replaced by the imperfect authority of Dr. Foote. Mason's use of the name Foote for this doctor—in a novel confronting the imperfect authority of official History—teases me as Mason delivers not the limited vision of official History but the revelation of gynecological history presented from a woman's most unofficial angle. The “historical” details of a prenatal exam in 1900 are as memorable as any battle record: the “thin towel put over her face … her dress raised and fastened … with clothes-pins onto some poles [to make] a barrier that kept [doctor and patient] from seeing each other's faces” (19). This barrier does not obscure the uneasy medical violation of a culturally normative sexual separation—a separation strong enough to prevent Christie from telling James about even the babies' kicking. This “historical” examination of Christie's over-sized pregnancy produces the misdiagnosis of “fibroids,” a prescription for a preparation to shrink them, and an unsatisfying answer to Christie's sense that her pregnancy is not normal. Equally “historical” are the doctor's birthing techniques. Arriving when Christie has already delivered the first of the quints, but is still “big as a barn” (26) with a belly “still a punkin under there” (24), he adjusts her into an awkward, painful position from which one of the women proclaims “she can't get nothing out” (28). The attending women recommend he “better get her up and bend her over.” His memorable medical reply is “I can work better with her in this position.”

In Sarah Orne Jewett's 1899 short story, “The White Heron,” the nineteenth-century female world of Sylvia and of nature itself encounters a threat in the form of a modern boy pursuing the science of ornithology. He carries a ten dollar bill to entice Sylvia to reveal the heron's secret dwelling. He carries a gun to shoot the bird he wants to study, wanting to know it differently than Sylvia knows it as she lives with it in the natural world. He carries, too, his own male appeal to a young girl. As in Jewett's story, science, money, and technology combine with a male authority to introduce a threatening confusion and the twentieth century itself. These same components of the modern intersect with Christie's efforts to keep her infants alive as best she can. The babies do best before the scientific Dr. Foote recommends both cow milk and opium-based soothing syrup to keep the babies from using “up their strength with too much crying” (178–79). They do best before the Friendship, the 3:03 train from Memphis, “stopped daily disgorging a fresh lot of sightseers into the cornfield” (207)—among them, those who have just been to the Memphis exposition of twentieth-century technology and now are adding a different sort of wonder to their trip. The babies do best before James' Uncle Wad transforms Christie's “miracle” into financial salvation by charging admission, a scheme that, he argues, will also provide the benefit of slowing “the crowd at the door so they won't bust in all at oncet” (171). “These people's going to come anyhow,” and it “ain't neighborly” to tell them “they can't come in your house. … If you got five babies instead of one, you make them work for you. That's the principle of thrift. …” (171–72). Those babies do better before James persuades Christie that collecting admission money is “an unavoidable necessity” (203) to ease their family debt to Wad for the land to grow the tobacco called Dark Fire. The babies do better before the authoritative town-fathers—like the authoritative boy who comes to tempt Jewett's Sylvia—come to tempt Christie, full of flattering courtesy. They are grateful for the national attention she brings to Hopewell—a place name that evokes Flannery O'Connor's Mrs. Hopewell with her mouth full of clichés and platitudes. No one is at all at fault for the babies not surviving. Christie's Mama describes the exposure that the babies do not survive by saying: “They were handled too much—just loved to death” (267). No one is at fault and yet science, money, technology, and authority each day contribute to the sequence.

Wad Wheeler with his avatar Greenberry McCain are perhaps the only near-villains in the piece, and mercenary as they are, they are pitiable rather than fearsome. Wad regularly darkens the scene, once spitting the juice of his tobacco wad “onto the hollyhock [Amanda] had trained to grow up … near the back door” (55). Later he counts his wad of collection money on Christie's birth-bed. When the train passes by after Minnie's death, Amanda thinks “Wad would charge a dime to let people see Minnie if Christie'd let him” (231). That is just what he does encourage once he grasps the possibilities offered by Sam Mullins' work.

Mullins' developing commerce and technology of death is another signpost of the modern. Expert skills in sympathy and condolence are a new twentieth-century commodity, and Mullins is introducing his industry to Hopewell. His skillful technology of preservation promises the previously unthinkable: loved ones, crowds, and science itself might “see the precious babies preserved, for always … preserved from decay till the end of time, or till the air hits them” (226). Older family members feel the jolt of change. Christie's Mama's complaint that “they took those babies away from us” (259) records family reaction to altering the mourning ritual—to not making the casket, to not tending, dressing, or watching the family's dead. Now, the ritual of separation is purchased rather than made. It comes with memorabilia, a fan combining a picture of Jesus with an ad for Mullins' establishment. It offers a technology both superb and grotesque. Behind glass in a large front parlor called the “Slumber Room,” the babies are no longer flesh and blood, but objects on display “tight and contorted, their … little features frozen like knots on fence posts, … petrified” (260). Mullins arranges them to show off his skills, bonnets removed, sleeves pulled up. To Mama, they “don't look right.” Worse, Mullins does not group them in the “right” order, the order in which Christie daily arranged them, and so Christie finds it “unbearable to see Minnie at the far right instead of the middle” (360), a violation she cannot correct.

Part of the stage arranged for this “modernized” and ornate spectacle of death is a curtained room where family are expected to retreat from visitors. Christie's grief is judged suspect when she does not cry there, but peers out, wanting to see the babies through others' curious eyes, finding that the spectators are, for her, the spectacle itself. This looking is what Christie has been doing since the age of spectacle first caught her in its gaze; that is, she reverses the glance and glimpses into other lives as they crowd rudely into hers. It was “as though she had been granted the opportunity to travel widely, to see strange faces from distant lands. She wasn't the show—she was watching the show” (180). The world comes to her with its rudeness, rapscallions, wonders, and provocations. It provides Christie with an education that puts her identity in flux, into the area of transition we met in Shiloh, and moves her character unexpectedly closer to the “New Woman” of the modern age.

Christie starts this transition from her first overwhelming and self-blaming feeling that she has been inadequate as a mother. She first accuses herself of failed biology, judgment, and selflessness (295). Her “milk wasn't good” (237). She “should have nursed [only] the largest and healthiest one and saved him.” If she had separated the babies, they wouldn't have brought crowds. She “should have given one to the woman who lost her baby” (266). She “didn't take care of them good enough” and “maybe … deserved to lose them.” From those guilty feelings, she passes to a more encouraging, and by degree, transforming, questioning about the babies and their deaths. More than once the novel recalls Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, not only in its historicity and its playful combination of a preacher with the topic of sexual guilt, but in its conscious puzzling over the meanings of signs. Christie comes from the religious tradition of those preachers she meets at Reelfoot who read life as a series of Divine, but masked, communications, who expect to find spiritual meaning in natural symbols. The task of interpretation is brought close to her when the same tradition reads her multiple births as a sign coming with the turn of the century. And it is brought unavoidably close when Amanda's daughter Little Bunch (who has a few oracular touches to her) without warning rips into the babies' bed bolster to reveal the feather crowns of the novel's title, those two “wads” of feathers, woven like nests (248). What did they mean? What does their presence, and the presence of so many other mysterious “signs” in life mean? What about the “egg with a perfect cross etched on it” (269) found by mama's neighbor? Christie's husband, James, gives her advice: “People are all the time finding signs. … But I don't think we know what signs mean. … It's a test … [God] wants us to trust in Him and stop trying to figure everything out.” James wants Christie “to stop asking questions. He wanted to trust blindly, to close his eyes to the past, go forward without reference to the babies. She wanted to know how they fit in …” (272). Resembling Leroy in “Shiloh,” James' desire not to interpret signs or speculate about “the insides of history” is not a good match for his wife's desire to know. “Why would God write out a sign if He doesn't want us to know?” Christie asks. “It plagues my mind. … Everything is a question” (269).

One area of new questioning for Christie concerns race, class, and the South. Old certainties are challenged by her contact with Mittens Dowdy, the “colored woman” sent to act as a wet nurse. Christie remembers only one other Negro she has known “up close”: Uncle Obie, who loved snakes—a sign, people said, that he had “the Devil in him.” Obie, she remembers, was “found dead along a rutted road one chilly morning. People said a whip snake had come along and thrashed him to death” (118). Never having explored her thoughts about racial antagonism, Christie meets Mittens with anxiety and even with some fear of her milk, for while the upper classes might commonly use “help,” in her own class prejudice is not complicated by a tradition of close contact in service. At first, Christie is fascinated with Mittens. She is excited by their “similar notions about bad luck and signs” (119). She is captivated by Mittens' expressiveness. Mittens talks to the babies under her breath while nursing them, mesmerizing them by inventing “scary stories full of surprise” (120), what Alma antagonistically calls “breathing hoodoo on those chillern,” but which is more nearly a kind of eloquence. The similarly expressive “lyrical, low tune” that Mittens hums deep in her throat also enters Christie, charms and bothers her, too. Christie moves beyond mere fascination as she shares the effort to nurture the infants with Mittens. When Mullins refuses to admit Mittens to the funeral viewing, judging “it won't do to bring her in” (263)—“a nigger that said she worked for you”—Christie goes out to receive her friend and impulsively leads her through the artificial decorum of the funeral home to the glass case, and to the intimate group of mourning family women. “What does she think she's doing?” she hears Mullins ask (264). Later when she travels throughout the nation, she generalizes from this particular incident in her education and repeatedly observes and assesses the postbellum South. “The Southern scene was burned into her brain by now: the bunches of dusty Negro children (‘ash cats’ she heard someone call them) watching the train go by; old women lugging buckets; brown and white dogs slinking through refuse, dusty mules loafing or pulling loads; shacks by the train tracks, the bare, hard dirt of the roads” (398). Christie is receptive to an education in racial hierarchy in part because she already has felt class hierarchy, a point made clear in her thoughts about Mrs. Blankenship, this “woman so different from herself … who never had to slop hogs or sucker tobacco,” whose decorative hats and gloves, silk and lawn bother Christie as she makes comparisons. Mrs. Blankenship calls Christie “darling” and presumes familiarity with the rising Mrs. Wheeler of the sudden “First Family of [the] city” (149), bringing an ornate powder box and puff to the farm as a baby gift. Yet the attention of the upper class does nothing to keep Christie from fearing that the crowds look down on her as merely working class, or “think we're hicks and live like animals, dropping a litter at a time” (320).

Christie's emerging friendship with Mittens is part of another structure of the novel—one presenting friendships between women. The Wiggins sisters fit this pattern, too. Big, Little, and Evelyn, like Mittens, are expressive women. They sing songs they “always knowed” (355) and probably learned from their mother (unlike Mittens whose mother never had “time for no songs” [175], and whose story is as different as the women's stories of different races are.) The sisters satisfy a need that Christie pinpoints when she tells James: “I miss their singing. I need them” (368). Like the sisters and Mittens, Christie's other female friends contribute to her education. As in so many American women's novels, friends model varied ways to be a woman. Christie is paired in particular with two—Amanda and Alma—who model opposing but equally unsatisfying alternatives. Alma embodies a practical, but too focused, efficiency. She is a paradigm of authority and “furious strength” (255), and Christie moves from conflict with, to respect for, her. Alma, however, gives Christie and other members of her family physical care without attentiveness to feeling (425). The feeling side of Alma has been sacrificed to the manager, the protector, the caregiver. She helps set the tone in a family where folks are “too busy putting food on the table to take care of each other … [and] nobody took time to look down deep at what was bothering a person.” Only once does Alma unexpectedly reveal her own history of feeling—her long disorientation and recovery following her loss of a baby. Only once does Christie observe Alma unexpectedly permitting herself affectionate play—in “a swinging game” with Thomas Hunt, with whom she “had never seemed like husband and wife.” Alma shows no loss when Thomas Hunt, a materialistic version of Eudora Welty's wandering King MacLain, roams far from home, until one day he disappears, perhaps murdered or perhaps settled somewhere with a new wife. Possibly another woman suits his self-indulgence differently by sharing it rather than serving it. On the opposite side of the spectrum of female possibility, Amanda embodies a strained, unsatisfied longing. She is all feeling and unsated seeking. Christie is repeatedly moved by “the warmth of Amanda's desire, the longing that seemed to shoot out of her in all directions” (429). And in moments of frustration with the family, Christie takes comfort in glances exchanged, “like old friends meeting in a crowd.” But Christie fears the strain in Amanda's personality, “something a little dangerous … as if she might consider doing the unthinkable—as though she had, in fact” (106). She suspects that Thomas Hunt, Alma's husband, might be that unthinkable thing. The secret in the smokehouse, however, is not simply sex. It is Amanda's suicide, perpetrated there after Amanda has lost her daughter Little Bunch and blamed her own self-preoccupation. Amanda can neither fit nor successfully break with the social prescription for gendered selflessness. She is an ancestor of those Mason women who will escape “proper” gender behaviors, but she lives before their time. Throughout, Amanda's self-centered desire is presented complexly as both a weakness and a strength. She takes greedy pleasure in “all the fuss [Christie's celebrity] stirred up” (371), as if she is thoughtlessly desperate for spectacle, needing it to distract her from her incompleteness. But on the other hand, Christie rightly wishes she could share her travel with Amanda who “would appreciate [it] so much more than James could, who would enjoy the privilege” (373). Amanda's ambiguity is emblematized in the fashionable gift she painstakingly makes Christie—the wreath of human hair that conveys a feeling of creativity gone awry. Woven from the dead babies' hair, the painstaking flowers of her wreath “were lifeless and brittle but intricate as feathers” (424), full of labor and even love, but without the capacity to transform—without the quality expressed in the recurrent songs that punctuate Christie's education. “The overall effect was of a carefully preserved bouquet of garden posies—sun-faded and drenched of their color. Dead” (423). Moved and disturbed, Christie puts the wreath “where she won't have to look at it everyday” and “at the time, she thought Amanda understood.”

In Christie, growing awareness results in a movement toward finding a voice, toward self-expression. Christie is a woman who has been hearing people say that “the cat had her tongue … since she was [her daughter's] size.” Suddenly “elevated onto a stage of importance” (182) and feeling “a new sense of power because the Sunday visitors had come to see her, needing her” (301), she begins to speak. And although she still speaks so softly that mostly no one hears (partly the result of no one listening), she begins to know what she wants to say. She starts by telling Wad “you ain't' got no heart” (182)—a remark spoken lightly but meant. Then, told by her niece that she should “write back and say thank you” to the multitudes writing her letters, Christie challenges the prescriptions of decorum: “‘Is that what I oughter say? … People like that come in my house and just wooled my babies to death,’ Christie said, in a voice so small no one even noticed” (297). Although asked by the men in her community to take her dead babies on National Tour, she wants “to do it for her own sake—to declare her independence.” When Wad congratulates her on her choice, he is plainly put aside:

“I reckoned you'd see it my way,” Wad said. …

“But I'm not seeing it your way.” Christie said with a clatter of plates. …

“I don't know what she means by that,” Wad said to James.

“Think on it.” said Christie, slapping a dishrag angrily at the table.

(301–2)

Christie goes into the world hoping to give its inhabitants “a piece of [her mind]” and to show them “what they done” (304). “What stirred inside her nowadays felt like ripe peaches splitting their skins” (309). She intends to “be master of the scene” (312). When the Wheelers are first exploitatively displayed in the Nashville Opera House by the showman Greenberry McCain, later identified by James' sarcasm as Gooseberry McPain, it is daunting to Christie to find herself on stage and afraid to look at her long dead babies' condition. Nevertheless, as anger rises, she manages to mutter her accusation: “Get your eyes full … My babies was wooled to death—pure and simple. … By people just like you” (328). She next speaks publicly in writing a promised traveler's letter for the Hopewell Chronicle—attempting the voice of small-town journalistic decorum and “trying for high tone,” while balancing formula with her own genuine need to express her discovery of concerns larger than Hopewell's, her socio-historical observation of a postbellum “Southland.” Looking her letter over, Christie feels “it is too simple, but she couldn't set down what was really in her heart” (336). As in Dwayne Hughes' letters home, a generic formula overtakes the writer's powers of self-expression. Gradually Christie also discovers and admits the futility of expressing herself on stage with the babies. She is unable to diminish “all the spite she had brought with her on the trip,” nor is she able to fulfill her “resolution to get even with the public” (345) when the audience is not listening to her story.

But, in the effort, she gains something. She gropes towards defining it for her granddaughter in the novel's final section, a frame where the now-elderly “country woman” briefly interprets her life for her female generations. She is speaking to a tape recorder at her granddaughter's request; it is a private communication sent in a public utterance—an explanation to be preserved. This is the audience who may receive what her earlier one could not hear. “I hated it,” she explains, “but I loved it too, in a way. It made me feel like somebody. It gave me something to look forward to. Women didn't get to do things back then like they can now. But I didn't realize what I was feeling half the time, I was so hurt. … But I did love the recognition, I know now, and we went traipsing around that fall because I wanted more of it. I wanted to get away from the farm and see what was out here in the wide blue world” (447). Speaking to this granddaughter is a reclaiming of generations as much as a presentation of self, because when Christie returned home from “doing what women didn't get to do back then,” her young daughter Nannie would not know her or James. Having left home to tell of the loss of her babies, she inadvertently loses another child. When she returns, the extended Wheeler family starts in on the new Christie, “so changed [she] fit in even less than [she] did before,” now even less than before a service-oriented caretaker resembling Alma, and they put it “to Nannie that [Christie] wasn't fit to be her mama” (448). One senses that the breach that circumstances created between mother and daughter may have narrowed over time, but that it is an unforgotten history, now reapproached. Christie speaks in a country voice less fully revealing than the one we have known in her head, but it is an informing historian's voice, interpreting the past so that generations might read its signs and connect them to the future.

In that taped message Christie speaks about “loss of faith.” Twentieth-century loss of faith has been a topic throughout. Before Christie leaves Hopewell, Amanda encourages and admonishes her with the phrase “just don't lose your faith” (307). But when Christie sums up her life, she admits: “I don't believe there's a heaven and I haven't believed it in many years … I lost my faith. I didn't know it at the time, and I never told anybody, not even James. But I believe he lost his faith too” (451). This conclusion of course is not news to the reader who has seen Christie move from guilt over her dream about a minister, to the firm and comic trespass of brazenly sewing on the Lord's day (“her mother would be horrified …” [398]), to her cynical speculation that Heaven's pearly gate might not by now be “those garage doors that open straight up” (446). “Loss of faith” covers a complexity of change. It is loss of faith in formal religion, especially clear the moment when side-show hawkers remind her of Reelfoot: “The preachers were medicine men, hawking their concoctions for saving the soul from damnation” (368). It is also a loss of faith in men. When the hanging of Fats Fortenberry—who did “his mama dirty before he shot her”—becomes another pleasure for crowds delighting, too familiarly, in spectacle, Christie surprises two execution revelers by shouting, “I hope when it's your turn you burn in Hell!” Unexpectedly attacked by this inexplicably passionate woman, “the men's mouths dropped. ‘Why, ma'am—’ they protest, unable to finish before Christie pronounces on them again: ‘Fats Fortenberry's a better man than either one of you!’” (390). It is, too, a loss of her own innocence, the innocence she and James eventually weep over. The oak chest frame to her dead babies' glass case is carved with “lambs, birds, vines, fruit, and berries—the Garden of Eden” (326). It is innocence from which she and James fall, a fall expressed in a photo capturing their frightened eyes. It is finally loss of faith in “God's mysterious ways” and in God Himself:

She kept wondering why God allowed such injustice. Why did the colored folks have to be slaves? … Why would a loving God punish anybody so harshly? Or why would He make a person like Charley Lou Pickles? She had been thinking hard thoughts about God lately. … Why would he punish her for having lustful thoughts … All she did was dream. There was a lot God hadn't punished, and a lot He hadn't punished enough. It was as though He punished randomly, for fun, or as though He couldn't keep up with all the misdeeds of the human race. Maybe after He created people, they multiplied so fast, they were out of control—like germs. Like the germs that killed her babies.

(389)

That image of germs, rather than sin, yielding tragedy brings us to a central shift in twentieth-century cultural history—the movement from religious to scientific authority and faith.

And here the novel is more complex than it at first seems with its pastoral distrust of science and technology. For Christie's questioning leads her to science. In her search for answers to why all this happened, new questions open. She accidentally discovers the Encyclopedia of Animal Life and reads “about strange creatures she hadn't known existed … creatures made of a single cell, and transparent, with eyes and mouths and innards, and even feet. They weren't germs, and they weren't the tiny beginnings of a larger life. They were complete in themselves” (381–82). This discovery of the paramecium and slipper animalcule opens both another world of signs to be read and another way of reading. “Where were these tiny things? … How would you know they were there if you couldn't see them? What was their purpose?” Science seeks answers to the sort of questions Christie has begun to ask, and in her time of greatest need Christie turns to science in the form of Dr. Graham Johnson, Institute of Man, Washington, DC. Johnson, from his place in the crowd, had offered his card and the polite suggestion of “help,” an offer Christie recalls when she eventually seeks a sanctuary to shield her infants' remains from the public's stare and from family greed. The Institute, which “studies scientific curiosities … and [is] devoted to the advancement of science, not to public entertainment,” would be happy to add the babies to its collection. Johnson is seemingly a genuine improvement over McPain; Johnson is capable of gestures of compassion, honesty, and thoughtfulness. But although Mason's portrait of science is not as dark as Willa Cather's in The Professor's House and “Tom Outland's Story,” where science is the disinterested lackey of government bureaucracy, Mason's portrait is deeply ambiguous, nonetheless. For while Johnson's promises—that “the infants would be in good hands if [she] were to deposit them” and would be “kept safe from the curious eyes of the public” (332)—are genuine, his inability to hear Christie's story is troubling. Taking notes on her case, he stops writing as she reaches what is for her the heart of the story, effectively silencing the interpretation she eventually leaves for her granddaughter. The scene is not given emphasis, but its implications linger. Johnson's sense of priority is not surprising; the Institute, he had told Christie earlier, is “only concerned with the natural phenomenon itself … We're not after the social history” (409). While science is respectful, tactful, refined, articulate, and gracious, in other ways it vaguely resembles McPain's sideshows; only the audience is more select. The Institute has preserved the brains “of a white man … an Indian and … a Negro, for comparative study,” organs from those who have died of dread disease, murder victims' tissue, Lincoln's bloodstains, brain tissue of most and least intelligent who ever lived, several pairs of Siamese twins, the brain of a dwarf. The collection is noble: “We just want to study why these differences occur, so we can understand them for the good of mankind. … There are so many things we don't understand about mankind—about our strange diversity” (411). But the self-description also recalls McPain's “Fair Day Exhibition Series, an educational series of lectures and diversions, for the purpose of educating the generally curious and concerned public” (303). Science asks only about phenomena and does not ask the question at which Christie eventually arrives: “She saw the central flaw in her desire to understand why such an extraordinary thing had happened to her. It wasn't why it happened—that couldn't be known; it was what people made of it” (417). History (and historical fiction), rather than science, can ask about this. Years later, Christie, faith lost, wonders if “me and James done the right thing, leaving our babies up there in Washington to be studied for science” (446). As in Cather's novel, Washington—seat of official history—is a presence looming in complementarity with the authority of science. The splendid monument of national government, scientific authority, and perhaps official history, too, is neatly summed up—and swiftly diminished—by James as “three domes in two days.”

As in twentieth-century American literature and culture generally, the search for spiritual fulfillment, having left the nineteenth-century sphere of the religious, goes elsewhere, but not into science. Instead it becomes synonymous with the search for sexual fulfillment. Christie's sexual story is one of being in jeopardy but of finding a way. After the babies' deaths, she grows increasingly distant from James. He blames Mittens' milk and the bottles given. He wants to forget. She welcomes McPain's tour. That travel diminishes James, separating him from his work and sense of purpose. He grows impatient with her feelings, with their exploitation, and in idleness, develops a creative sarcasm. She is full of contempt for his tendency to curse rather than explore; going to see the snake woman without him, she snaps, “Look at the world, James. … You might learn something.” His voice, as we hear it against others introduced, sounds increasingly “country.” Unworldly, he is weak against McPain's shenanigans because he believes he does not know how to travel in these “foreign” cities, and so is dependent on the show master. She, living in cramped spaces with this altered and irritated James, finds herself increasingly repulsed by the physical presence in which she once took an excess of delight.

But it is with James that Christie shapes the cure for what ails them. In a moment of intimate banter, rubbing liniment onto her ache in a scene that turns to foreplay and releases grief, confusion, desire, comfort, and decision, they literally achieve the “miracle cure” of side-show medicine. Their play mocks all posturing and imposturing authority:

“What is this stuff?” he asked. “Can you drink it?”

“I think you can do anything with it,” she said with sudden abandon. “You can shine brass or clean buggy rigging. It cures piles.”

“Reckon it'll unstop the gug? Or clean sores?”

“It polishes furniture. Anything you're a mind to do with it.” She laughed, and she could see he was grinning.

“Well, it must be a miracle.”

He rubbed her back and the liniment soaked in, but it was the warmth of his hands that soothed the ache. …

(393)

In the breath-catching moments that follow, the couple focus their dilemma. Weeping “for their innocence,” they shortly afterwards pull down the shade, placing Christie's shift over their children in the glass case. Then “their passion [was] like something free they had forgotten to claim” (396). Able to acknowledge “what a hurtful thing they had done by denying each other an intimate touch throughout that terrible time” (429), Christie is relocating what she earlier felt rising with spring changes in the natural world. That is, the capacity for seeing spring even as your infants die, for pleasure in the midst of grief, for responding to “coming irises and the blackberry lilies … little brown jugs, jack-in-the-pulpits, lady's slippers … five different kinds of violets … a slant of sun through the cracks in the barn planks … [and] the old bull in the pasture coming in [her] direction, his baggage swinging—aiming at her, as though he were about to devour her with love” (252). She is relocating what she found in a bluesy “holler” rising out “of the trees the way a bird's song would,” performed by an anonymous man, a song about a “woman large and soft and dark as the river at night” (374), overheard in the woods. In her final words to her granddaughter, the novel's last, she again relocates desire: “I want to see a flock of blackbirds whirl over the field, making music. Things like that are absolutely new every time they happen” (454). In this resolution, Mason is uniting Southern and female pastoral traditions which celebrate nature and its expressions over the powers that seek to control or study it. These traditions are themselves aspects of the transition into the modern, portrayed in a historical vision that acknowledges history as what happens to us as we live in a changing culture, not necessarily as we live close to historical event.

Works Cited

Brinkmeyer, Robert. “Finding One's History: Bobbie Ann Mason and Contemporary Southern Literature.” Southern Literary Journal 19.2 (1987): 22–33

Foote, Shelby. Shiloh. New York: Random, 1952

Fuss, Diana. “Getting Into History.” Arizona Quarterly 45.4 (1989): 95–108

Hobson, Fred. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991

Ladd, Barbara. “‘Too positive a shape not to be hurt’: Go Down Moses. History and The Woman Artist in Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples.” Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America. Ed. Harriet Pollack. Bucknell Review, 39.1(1995):

Mason, Bobbie Ann. Feather Crowns. New York: Harper, 1993

———. In Country. New York: Harper, 1986

———. Shiloh, and Other Stories. New York: Harper, 1982

Sheppard, R. Z. “Neighbors” [a review of Shiloh, and Other Stories]. Time 3 Jan. 1983

Towers, Robert. “American Graffiti.” [a review of Shiloh, and Other Stories]. The New York Review of Books 16 Dec. 1982

Wilhelm, Albert E. “Making Over or Making Off: The Problem of Identity in Mason's Short Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal 18.2 (1986): 76–82

———. “An Interview with Bobbie Ann Mason” Southern Quarterly 26.3 (1988): 27–38