[In the following essay, Thompson discusses where the search for self-knowledge leads several of Gilchrist's protagonists.]

Few writers can achieve with a first collection of short stories published by a university press the kind of instant popular success and critical acclaim Ellen Gilchrist won with In the Land of Dreamy Dreams: Not only did it immediately sell out its first printing, the collection was literally the talk of New Orleans, selling many copies by word of mouth and winning for its author a substantial contract with a notable publisher for a novel and another collection of stories. Gilchrist’s regional success has been explained in much the same way the regional success of writers like Walker Percy, Eudora Welty and, more recently, John Kennedy Toole has been explained: that is, readers in the South cannot resist the descriptions of settings, landscapes, dialects and societies which, love them or not, are easily recognizable as home. Yet, like these writers, Gilchrist writes fiction that is more than regional. Indeed, if it is regional, it is so in the sense that the works of Dostoyevsky and Flaubert are regional, which is to say that it represents not regionalism so much as the successful capturing of a social milieu. Gilchrist captures the flavor and essence of her region without drowning in its idiom. She does not diminish her work by parroting already established Southern voices or depending upon stereotypes of landscapes and character. The view that Gilchrist gives us of the world is a very straight and narrow path of realism, traditional fiction peopled with characters whom life doesn’t pass by, characters who lust and kill and manipulate, and most importantly, dream.

The focus of Gilchrist’s realism in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, as well as in her novel, The Annunciation is the female psyche, for Gilchrist puts us deeply inside a female point of view in eleven of the fourteen stories as well as in much of the novel. Even in “Rich,” “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society,” and “Suicides,” stories in which she employs a more nearly omniscient point of view, her narrators still manage to sound as if they are characters in her stories. (Gilchrist similarly manipulates the point of view in The Annunciation, making us privy to the minds of various characters as well as the protagonist, Amanda McCamey.) In “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society,” the narrator’s eye and voice are those of a woman confiding to her friend in a beauty salon, much like Flannery O’Connor’s omniscient narrators who often sound like the “Georgia crackers” who people her stories. The result of an intense focus on the female point of view and a shortage of three-dimensional male characters will undoubtedly result in charges by some of Gilchrist’s lack of range. Fortunately, the placement of “Rich” as the first story in the collection presents Tom Wilson, perhaps the only fully rounded male character in the book. The glimpses we are given of his coming to terms with a hatred of his difficult daughter Helen, are some of the most poignant and human scenes in the collection. Yet, when we put all the stories together, add up all the views the reader gets of the female mind, the composite suggests that Gilchrist’s treatment of women is very traditional and in several areas resembles that of her predecessors.

Like at least two Grandes Dames of Southern fiction, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, Gilchrist evidences a type of Romantic Calvinism in her view of women. On one hand, she seems delighted with the idea of innate depravity, while on the other she seems convinced that a woman’s life is often like an extended downhill sled ride, starting out with much promise for excitement and speed, but troubled by ill-placed obstacles, icy spots, and a fizzle at the end. For example, Gilchrist likes to show her young protagonists as simultaneously wonderful and horrible. In “Traveler,” LeLe prefers telling lies to telling the truth, concocting wild tales to tell her summer companions about her social success back in Indiana, when in fact she has just lost a bid for cheerleader. When her cousin Baby Gwen Barksdale greets LeLe at the train station, LeLe tells her that “practically the whole football team” saw her off at the station back home, and then she creates a melodramatic tale about a college boy she supposedly dates who is dying of cancer. LeLe’s sloth is shown through her failure to face up to the real cause of her obesity. She does not feel guilty for all of the lies she tells. In fact, the only emotion akin to guilt she feels is the remorse she experiences for eating vanilla ice cream directly out of the carton while the freezer door stands open, something she is sure Sirena the maid knows about and holds against her. Yet for all of LeLe’s exaggerations and lies, the reader cannot fail to be charmed by her sheer spunk when she swims the five miles across the lake with Fielding, her summer crush, and exuberantly realizes that she has created an identity for herself. “I was dazzling. I was LeLe Arnold, the wildest girl in the Mississippi Delta, the girl who swam Lake Jefferson without a boat or a life vest. I was LeLe, the girl who would do anything” (151). LeLe’s exaggerations sound as if she has listened too often to Scarlett O’Hara’s lines in Gone With the Wind, but her gutsy actions are more reminiscent of Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda stories, stories in which the female characters gain more than petty desires and whims by their actions. What LeLe gains by swimming the lake has much in common with what Miranda’s idol, Aunt Amy, gains by riding off to Mexico astride a horse in “Old Mortality.” Just as Miranda’s dull life is reshaped by this socially rebellious event, LeLe cannot forget when she returns to hum-drum Indiana how “the water turned into diamonds in [her] hands” that day (153).

In “Revenge,” Gilchrist uses the same pattern with success. Rhoda is only ten years old when she is sent with all of her brothers and male cousins, five in all, to spend the summer with their grandmother during World War II. Rhoda’s language is spicy and her thoughts are full of how sweet it would be to get even with the hateful boys who constantly ignore and diminish her abilities. Rhoda is particularly angry about the fact that the boys will not allow her to participate in the building of the Broad Jump Pit, and she calls vicious remarks to them from the distance at which they keep her. Secretly she begins to pray that the Japanese will win the war so that they will come and torture her tormentors. She puts herself to sleep at night imagining their five tiny wheelchairs lined up in a row while she rides around by her father’s side in his Packard. In short, Rhoda’s spirit is eaten alive with envy and bitterness, hate and anger. Yet she gets her revenge and a miraculous boost for her self-image when she sneaks away from her cousin Lauralee’s wedding festivities to strip off her plaid formal and vault over the barrier pole at the Broad Jump Pit. Rhoda imagines “half the wedding” is calling her name and climbing over the fence to get her when she runs down the path in the light of the moon to sail victoriously over the barrier. The Romantic vision of this early success is amplified by Rhoda’s last thought: “Sometimes I think whatever has happened since has been of no real interest to me” (124). This line does a great deal to separate Rhoda from other depraved and naughty young female protagonists such as Carson McCullers’s Frankie Addams in A Member of the Wedding or Flannery O’Connor’s child protagonist in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”

Indeed, in story after story Gilchrist’s grown-up female protagonists are living life after the Fall. She in fact reworks the pattern in The Annunciation, though with a different result. In “There’s a Garden of Eden,” Alisha Terrebone decides that although she has always been a renowned beauty, her preeminence is drawing to a close. Alisha perceives herself to be “soft and brave and sad, like an old actress” (43). Like many of Gilchrist’s characters, she becomes to others what she perceives herself to be. She is painfully aware of the folly of her life, nonetheless, knowing that inevitably her present lover will leave her. She thinks, “And that is what I get for devoting my life to love instead of wisdom” (47).

In their downhill journey through life, the protagonists of these stories run into obstacle after obstacle to mar their gorgeous, effortless journeys. In “1957, a Romance,” Rhoda fears another pregnancy and cannot face what she perceives as the ugliness of her body. In the title story, LaGrande McGruder finds her obstacle in the form of “That goddamn little new-rich Yankee bitch,” a crippled, social-climbing Jewish woman who forces LaGrande to cheat if she wants to win in a game of tennis, the only thing important in LaGrande’s life other than her integrity and pride at being at least a third-generation member of the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club. In “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society,” Lelia McLaurin’s life tumbles into chaos as the trappings of the social revolution of the sixties—blacklights, marijuana, and pushers—trickle down into her adolescent son Robert’s life and then into her own carefully ordered home. Lelia’s buffer from such madness and social unrest is to visit her hairdresser, who shares Lelia’s psychiatrist and who creates for Lelia a hairdo that resembles a helmet.

Thus in gathering for the reader a whole cast of female characters in various stages of life, with the character Rhoda appearing by name in four of the stories, Gilchrist achieves a kind of coherence of style and voice that is absent from many first collections of short fiction. She invites us to compare these women with each other and determine whether or not the sum of their experiences adds up to more than just their individual lives. The result is a type of social commentary that pervades the work, full of sadness and futility. By dividing the collection into sections, Gilchrist emphasizes how “place” has affected these females’ lives, and how what has been true in the past may exist nowhere other than in dreams in the future. The rural and genteel Mississippi in which Matille and the very young Rhoda summer seems to offer little preparation for the life in which Rhoda finds herself in 1957, in North Carolina with a husband and two small sons and the fear of a third child on the way. Clearly nothing in LaGrande McGruder’s life has prepared her for the disruption of a society she has always known, nor for the encroachment of dissolution upon her territory. Similarly, Lelia McLaurin’s only plan for escape is a weekend spent with her husband on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, just as they used to do in the old days, driving to Biloxi with a shaker full of martinis.

With the creation of Amanda McCamey, the female protagonist in her new novel, The Annunciation, Gilchrist may be reversing the trend set by Rhoda, LeLe, Matille, even LaGrande McGruder and Lelia McLaurin. Amanda is possibly Gilchrist’s first female protagonist who may be elevated to the class of hero. Although Amanda has in common with her “sisters” a penchant for the downhill slide, a heavy cargo of guilt, and a similar Mississippi Delta/New Orleans background, she redeems herself with an honest attempt to flee “the world of guilt and sorrow,” to borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor, by literally asserting her will against the forces that would slow her down in her bid for a self-directed, meaningful life.

Amanda is the central focus of the novel, most of which is narrated in a close third person through her perceptions, though occasionally Gilchrist, like O’Connor, dips into the consciousnesses of other characters for a balancing effect. Still, it is Amanda’s story, her quest to know who she is and how to live her life that is the main theme of the novel.

The Annunciation is divided into three sections: “Cargo,” “Exile,” and “The Annunciation,” the latter being about four times as long as the second, which is twice as long as the first. This structure invites questions: What is Amanda’s “cargo”? From what or whom and to where is she exiled? Is “the annunciation” intended as a scriptural parallel? If not, is it used ironically?

Amanda’s “cargo” we learn is in part her guilt over a child born out of wedlock and given up for adoption when Amanda is just fourteen. In the second section of the novel, it is revealed that her daughter, adopted by a wealthy New Orleans family, the Allains, has married and is living on State Street only blocks from Amanda. Eventually their paths cross: Amanda and Barrett Allain Clare pass each other on the way to the ladies room at Antoine’s one evening, and later when Amanda sees Barrett fighting with her husband Charles she almost intervenes. Still later, they are even introduced to one another by a mutual friend. Though their relationship is profound, mother and daughter can’t and don’t recognize one another.

Growing up in the same small Mississippi county, Issaquena, which figured prominently in at least three of the short stories, Amanda is drawn from an early age to her athletic, darkly handsome first cousin Guy. They seem to be the pride of the stock on Esperanza plantation, and as children they develop an intense loyalty that later blossoms into sexual attraction when they are adolescents.¹ When Guy is eighteen and a football sensation in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, and Amanda a precocious fourteen year old, she seduces Guy. Though she desires him physically, she also feels a spiritual need to keep him near. As they make love for the first time she thinks, “Guy is ours. … Guy belongs to us” (14). She dreads the thought of him leaving for college because it will mark the end of their childhood together and the relationship they have had. It also heralds, ultimately, the close of their direct ties with the place they were reared, the Mississippi Delta. Unfortunately, Amanda becomes pregnant and is sent to a Catholic home for unwed mothers in New Orleans. This is the beginning of “what she must carry with her always. Her cargo” (15). From then on she is irretrievably split from Guy, and, for a good part of her life, from herself. The fact that the baby girl she delivers by Caesarian section is taken from her, remembered as a slick, slippery thing with eyes squeezed shut, haunts her throughout the novel.

“Now you can be a girl again,” Sister Celestine tells Amanda as she prepares to leave New Orleans for Virginia Seminary (20). But, of course, Amanda has been initiated into the adult world, though she only dimly perceives it through her obsessions with pleasures of the body and her own vanity; there is to be no return to girlhood. Although later Guy drives to meet her at school, it is clear that a continued relationship with him is out of the question. Amanda’s cargo, then, also is loss—loss of her home place, her closest friend and lover, Guy, and her first child.

Amanda’s period of “exile” takes place in New Orleans, the land of dreamy dreams, where she enters Uptown society by marrying Malcolm Ashe, a wealthy Jewish management lawyer. Their childless marriage is further marred by Amanda’s alcoholism—a state that existed prior to their union. In the “Exile” chapters, Gilchrist covers some of the same territory traversed in the New Orleans society exposé stories of In the Land of Dreamy Dreams: the Junior League women, the politically corrupt men, materialism of the rankest sort, “good” schools, worried children, class consciousness, racism, and sterility. Amanda eventually sobers up, awakening to realize that these people either hate each other or themselves. “What am I doing here?” (69), she wonders but, until she stops drinking, she can’t find her way out of the maze.

Amanda’s ticket out of town is the interest that she develops in language translation while pursuing a degree at Tulane University. Chiefly with the support of her black maid, her friend and “ally” Lavertis, Amanda is able to stop drinking and find the encouragement to go to school. Also at this time, Amanda and Guy have a brief reunion at their grandmother’s funeral at Esperanza, which they will jointly inherit. They are drawn together again through grief and “the old desire”; they even leave the post-funeral gathering in Guy’s car and end up making love in the rain. But when they discuss the daughter that neither of them knows, it is obvious that Guy is obsessed with locating the girl and is no happier than Amanda.

Amanda’s exile is both literal and metaphorical. Exiled from her home territory, the family plantation, Esperanza, in Mississippi, she has not yet found her second home, Fayetteville, Arkansas. On a figurative level, she is exiled from herself through her drinking and also in her lack of knowledge as to who she is and what she should do with her life. Childless, without a career, the wife of a rich man, living with guilt over her daughter, Amanda is in despair most of the time. Yet one of the main themes of The Annunciation is Amanda’s bid for freedom through self-knowledge. During their time alone at their grandmother’s funeral, Guy offers to leave his wife and take Amanda some place where they can be happy. Amanda, who is waking up from a dream of happy-endings, refuses his offer, saying, “all I’m really trying to do is find out what I’m good at. So I can be a useful person, so I can have some purpose” (60). When Guy says he can give her anything “that goddamn ingratiating Jew” can give her, she replies that she’s not interested in money. “I want something else,” she tells Guy. “Something I don’t know the name of yet” (59).

Eventually, Amanda gets a chance to name her desire. She becomes involved in translating a manuscript smuggled out of the Vatican and put into the hands of Marshall Jordon, a seventy plus year old translation scholar from the writing program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Ironically, Amanda will translate a manuscript of poems in middle French by a poet named Helene Renoir, who also had an illegitimate child, was sent away to live with nuns, and who chose to hang herself at age twenty-one. It is Amanda’s involvement with this project, her separation and eventual divorce from Malcolm, and her move to Fayetteville to start a new life as a single, working woman that constitute her deliverance from exile. Thus the stage is set for her “annunciation.”

Arriving in Fayetteville with all the best intentions of living alone, Amanda starts out well, and her new ally, Katie Dunbar, an extremely strong, positive female counter-psyche for Amanda, stands by her throughout her emergence into wholeness. The theme of freedom is highlighted when on the first night alone in her new home, after the guests have gone, Amanda must bravely face exactly what it was she wanted: solitude. A poignant moment occurs in which we see Amanda summoning her power for courage:

This is it, she thought. This is what I dreamed of. The old sugar maples outside the window moved in the wind, sending shadows onto the wall behind her. That doesn’t scare me, she thought. Nothing scares me. That’s only the wind I’m watching. That wind has traveled around the world a million times to be with me. That wind was alive when Helene Renoir walked the earth.

(147)

But Amanda is still Amanda, and soon she is restless, bored and lonely. Though she has learned that freedom is necessary for her work, the isolation of freedom is hard to take. Before long she becomes involved with Will Lyons, a twenty-five year old local guitar player who gives her pure joy and lets her believe she wants to love again. The night after she first goes to bed with him, she menstruates for the first time in months, and believes Will has “touched the part of [her] that wants to live” (164). Once again Amanda’s nameless desire seems close to articulation.

The tug between real, joyous, even stormy love and the need to accomplish her work is a fierce struggle for Amanda, and it is further complicated by money: her abundance of it and Will’s complete lack of it. Not surprisingly, her translations play second fiddle when her young lover comes “breezing in and put[s] his hands on her hair” (191). Later, when they are swimming in a local river, she is unafraid to show off her older woman’s body. She strips and swims alone in the water. Will, impatient, young, is soon ready to leave, but Amanda dives far and deep, as if away from him and all the world, perhaps even herself. Their relationship is fraught with paradoxes.

On a spring white water canoe trip down the Buffalo in Arkansas, Amanda and Will make love on a rocky beach in the middle of the night. Earlier in the day, Amanda had felt a “sharp pain low on her left side”—“the old quirky pain of ovulation.” On their way home after their night on the beach, Amanda and Will wait out a thunder storm and later, when Amanda grows “bored with the river” and fails to pay attention, she accidentally turns over the canoe. She and Will are spilled out into treacherous white water. In a bluntly brutal yet lyric passage, Amanda encounters Death. Her own mortality seems about to sweep her away, and she appears willing to surrender to it—presumably just as she has conceived for the first time in thirty years! The passages of conception and the nearness of death are surprisingly similar and bear comparison, foreshadowing as they do the nearly simultaneous birth of the child and the death of Will in the last pages of the novel. In each, lyricism heightens the narrative:

Amanda woke in the night. There was mist all over the water and the little rock peninsula. She stirred in Will’s arms, moving her body against his until she woke him. Then, half asleep on the hard bed of the earth they made love as softly as ever they could in the world. Love me, Amanda’s body sang. Dance with me, his body answered. Dance with me, dance with me, dance with me.

Now, the darkness demanded. And Amanda surrendered herself to the darkness and the river and the stars.

(243)

A very similar demand darkly presents itself to Amanda when the canoe overturns less than twenty-four hours later:

Everything in the world was cold green water, so cold, so very cold. The whole world was singing in a higher key. She could not breathe, the pressure of the water against her chest was so deep, so hard and dark and cold and full. I am here forever, she thought. This is what it is to die, this pressure, this powerlessness. Then Amanda let go of fear, surrendered, gave in to the water, gave in to her death.

(246)

Amanda does not give in, however; something impells her to save herself. One can perhaps conclude that the life inside her has done this; at any rate, Amanda is destined to survive, unlike Helene Renoir, her role model from another life.

Soon after their bittersweet canoe trip, Will strikes out to solve his money troubles by working on an off-shore oil rig. Some time later, Amanda learns that she is pregnant and writes to Will, telling him of her pregnancy, and also that she has learned her daughter’s name and whereabouts from Guy. On his way back to Fayetteville to see his child, Will (who dreams of literally giving children to Amanda) stops in New Orleans to tell Barrett Clare that her mother is alive and well and loves her. Though Will never makes it home, this gift, given impulsively as befits his youthfulness, surely immortalizes him for Amanda.

Gilchrist’s choice of The Annunciation as a title for her novel about a woman who, after giving up one child at age fourteen, gives birth to a son thirty years later on Christmas Eve leads one to question how closely the novelist intends to parallel the biblical annunciation. Perhaps the author is playing with this motif, suggesting a modern version of “miracle.” If one goes to what is considered by many to be the loveliest of the four gospels, St. Luke, and reads the disciple’s account of Mary’s annunciation, some parallels can be seen to Gilchrist’s novel. However, a word of warning is in order at the outset: while this approach sheds interesting light on Gilchrist’s structure and helps clarify certain details in The Annunciation, the main character’s hardline stand against organized Christianity, and the Roman Catholic church in particular, makes the possibility of the author’s intention to render a strict biblical reference or allegory highly unlikely. Neither is Gilchrist satirizing Christianity; rather, she takes what she needs to shape her narrative. Still, what she appears to need of the New Testament is quite revealing.

To begin with, Amanda is told of her pregnancy by a masseuse who has looked into her eye and seen “a little configuration.” This “unwashed hippie doctor of the hills with his gorgeous tan,” is, coincidentally, named Luke. After learning her amazing news, Amanda plays briefly with the idea that Luke is “the angel of the Annunciation.” Somewhat comically, she imagines that he has almost struck a classical pose of the annunciation angel: “His hands were folded at his chest. He might have dropped to one knee” (279). In addition, she notices that she is wearing the Virgin’s colors, “blue shorts, white T-shirt,” and calls herself “Maria Amanda Luisa, the gray-blue virgin of the middleweights.” Luke’s words, “a special case. A very special child,” ring for her, and she wonders whether her young lover Will is her “Joseph leading the donkey.” But Amanda puts her feet back on the earth when she admits that “he is not here. … I have not even heard from him and there is no donkey” (279). Amanda, the High Blasphemer, decides that “it’s time to think straight,” and so for the moment she ends her flirtation with outright scriptural comparisons.²

A fiction writer might be understandably attracted to the gospel of Luke, the “storyteller,” who is interested above all in people and especially women. It is in Luke’s gospel that human beings speak most eloquently and dramatically, often breaking into songs. As Mary Ellen Chase points out in The Bible and the Common Reader, Luke alone includes in his Gospel the Magnificat of Mary. In addition, Luke is known to biblical scholars and readers as a setter of scenes and a chronicler of homely details.³

Like the Virgin Mary, Amanda has a close relationship with a female companion, Katie Dunbar. For Mary it is the mother of John, Elisabeth (who also experienced a miracle), and it is in her presence that Mary sings of the angel’s visitation and her joy. Though there isn’t a strict parallel to this in The Annunciation, Amanda is comforted repeatedly by the “experienced” and wise Katie at the potter’s home. Finally, one notes that St. Luke refers to Judea as “hill country” and Gilchrist sets her final portion of the book, “The Annunciation,” in the hills of northwest Arkansas.

Perhaps a more productive comparison to make, however, is the fact that Mary’s news comes to her as a disturbing revelation, and Amanda is likewise extremely troubled by her unexpected pregnancy. She is unmarried, forty-four years old, presumably has experienced an early menopause, and is about to embark upon a possibly auspicious career as a translator of middle French and as a writer. The prospect of having a baby and the ensuing duties of motherhood appear to stand directly in her path toward self-determination. Gilchrist deals with a sharply realistic situation: a woman who perhaps must choose between a career and motherhood, options which until this point have both been closed to Amanda. She struggles with the conflict, and even goes to Tulsa for an abortion, but then she changes her mind, gets drunk to celebrate and has to be taken care of by the Good Samaritan Katie. At this point Amanda seems to have reached a low point, but like Mary, she comes to believe that nothing is impossible and so decides to have the child.

As if sensing that this birth will help ease the guilt with which she has lived for thirty years, Amanda joyfully prepares for labor in her go-for-broke style, “training like she was going out for the Olympics,” Katie observes (344).⁴ Finally, although the word “obey” seems an odd one for Amanda McCamey, she does in some sense obey a law of nature by not having the abortion. Like Mary, she acquieses to motherhood. Though what Amanda does may not be said to have strictly to do with grace in the Christian sense, she does redeem herself by being able to give life, through her son, and therefore forgive herself of her sins. Here, then, is the novel’s central theme: Amanda’s life-long search for love and acceptance and peace.

Amanda achieves a form of heroism by overcoming her alcoholism and to a certain extent, her materialism, and by giving of herself through her late-life motherhood. The favor that she seeks through learning how to live her life is won through hard circumstances, and will be won anew through even harder days to come as she learns of Will’s death and as she seeks her daughter, an event that will surely take place given Will’s visit to State Street and Amanda’s nearly simultaneous resolve to meet the young woman, Barrett Clare.

As parents of Barrett Clare, Amanda and Guy must face what proves “desperately hard”: their act of incest (they were first cousins) and their ultimate responsibility to identify and subsequently love their child, a responsibility from which they can no longer run or hide.⁵ The question remains whether Guy and Amanda ever achieve true, lasting heroism. For Guy, it is not so clear cut. With a great deal of money and power within his reach, the first step toward facing his daughter is easily taken when he asks a rich New Orleans politico to find out about the girl’s fate. When handed the information, however, Guy asks to have it summarized for him; he can’t bear to read it. Later, he visits the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club and watches his daughter play a match “as if she were a tennis-playing machine.” He sees his grandson, a “wild fat little red-headed boy” and feels deeply the need to know this child also. Yet Guy can’t approach Barrett alone; he needs Amanda. By the novel’s end, Guy hasn’t yet contacted his daughter.

Amanda, on the other hand, vows to find her daughter after her son is born, though she had earlier refused to go with Guy to see their child. In the final pages, the possibility for her heroism is strongly hinted; we can believe that, buoyed by the strength which she has already gained from loving her baby son, she will have the courage to seek and acknowledge her first born.

As the novel closes, Amanda drifts to sleep shortly after delivering her son, “dreaming of herself in a white silk suit holding her beautiful daughter in her arms.” She at last has the courage to imagine the reunion a happy one, though formerly she had always dreamt of the meeting in nightmare. Perhaps at this point Amanda goes beyond courage to hubris, as she continues: “My life leading to my lands forever and ever and ever, hallowed be my name, goddammit, my kingdom come, my will be done, amen, so be it, Amanda” (353). In her blasphemy of the Lord’s Prayer, Amanda McCamey gropes toward self-respect, forgiveness and love. There is nothing irreverent in Amanda’s creation of her own liturgy as she accepts motherhood and acknowledges a degree of selflessness shortly before she goes into labor:

This is my body which is not broken by you. This is my flesh and blood. This is myself. I am going to stop being alone in the world. Already I am not alone. Already a miracle is inside of me. Already a miracle has occurred. My child, my ally, are you listening. I love you so much. I can not tell you how I love you. Be well, be whole, stay well.

(325)

Later, when the child lies peacefully in his mother’s arms, in Gilchrist’s contemporary nativity, Amanda speaks to him in words that are surely holy for the love and forgiveness they embody:

“Flesh of my flesh,” she whispered. “Bone of my bone, blood of my blood. You are kin to me,” she whispered, touching his soft hair. Kin to me, kin to me, kin to me. And the memory of the other child was there with them, but it was softer now, paler.

(347–48)

Guided often in her life by lust, hunger, greed, and curiosity, Amanda finally, at age forty-four, begins to direct her own life with loving intelligence: “My life on my terms, my daughter, my son” (353). The lyricism of the ending of The Annunciation is a hymn to self-determination, from which we can only wonder at the reserves of Amanda McCamey’s imagination and strength.

In her two works of fiction to date, Ellen Gilchrist portrays the workings of a complex female psyche through a variety of women of all ages. Rhoda, Matille, Alisha Terrebone, and Amanda McCamey, to name a few, are all mined from the lode of a larger consciousness which Gilchrist is working with amazing confidence. It is encouraging to see that with The Annunciation a possibility for redemption appears on the horizon for Gilchrist’s anguished but tenacious women. The writer has struck one element that may lead to a greater wealth for her characters: courage to face the truth about themselves. With this discovery, Gilchrist’s women may go further in future works to develop a realism that not only entertains but enobles.

Notes

1. This treatment of children’s sexual awakenings is similar to the children’s sex games in “Summer, an Elegy,” in which Matille and Shelby discover sex while in bed recovering from typhoid vaccinations. Later, when Shelby dies while under anesthesia, Matille feels she has been freed from guilt and the fear that he will tell of their game, though clearly a part of her has also died, as he was her first lover.

2. Gilchrist also toys with the notion of immaculate conception. Shortly before the birth scene, Katie Dunbar’s boyfriend Clinton asks, “What about the father?” Katie replies that “she willed it into being, all by herself out of light and air” (315). Though this is meant lightheartedly, Amanda uses the word “miracle” to describe her child only pages later.

3. See Chase’s comments (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 284–89, on Mary in Luke’s gospel.

4. Amanda is essentially a life-affirmer and is powered by the will to live. One should note here that her lover’s name “Will” invites a supposition that when he dies, practically at the moment she is giving birth to their son, a transference of “will” takes place.

5. That their daughter Barrett Clare has suffered from feelings of neglect, isolation, abandonment, and despair—despite, or perhaps because of, her adoption by a wealthy New Orleans family—is made painfully apparent: she has a terrible relationship with her husband (he represents the “heartless” New Orleans society that threatened to consume Amanda) and is out of touch with herself and trying desperately to gain self-respect by playing ferocious tennis and writing anemic confessional poetry. Her links to humanity are through her psychiatrist, Gustave (an obviously one-sided infatuation based on narcissism: she believes he loves her but his job is to be interested in her) and through her love for her hyperactive son.