[Bolsterli is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She has written several books on the South. In the following essay, she discusses how Gilchrist presents the Southern woman's experience through her characters Rhoda Manning and Anna Hand.]

Since the experiences of any powerless class are considered less interesting than those of the powerful, one of the differences between the writing done by men and women has been the tendency for women to ignore the basic facts of their existence because it was not considered significant enough to read about. On the other hand, because of their superior status, men’s every thought, feeling or movement has been considered valid subject for literature, easy access for a writer to a vast area of material. However, the current phase of the women’s movement has brought a gradual realization that women are not powerless in their own sphere, that as Adrienne Rich’s line goes in “From an Old House in America,” “my power is brief and local, but I know my power”—and that the key to transcendence for a writer lies in validating that experience rather than in repudiating it. Because the roles of women and men have traditionally been more clearly defined in the South than in any other region of America, the experience of Southern women, so different from that of its men, is a relatively unmined goldfield. Ellen Gilchrist goes a step further than the canonical Southern women writers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, in validating that experience because she is willing to go deeper into personality, to shine a light into the dark corners of women’s souls to expose the preoccupations that get in the way of their achieving wholeness and coherence. Moreover, she writes about the problems of the female sphere without denying the pleasures in it. Food obsessions may get in the way of happiness, but Gilchrist’s characters who have addictions also enjoy the chocolate they cannot resist.

One significant issue she examines is the difficulty of breaking out of the cocoon of the female experience into creativity. For instance, Rhoda Manning’s dilemma in “Revenge,” or “The Summer of the Broad Jump Pit,” illustrates the double bind that tied up bright little southern girls in the nineteen-forties and gave them some of the problems that are so painful to meet in many of the adolescent and adult women in her stories.¹ Anna Hand, in “Anna, Part I,” shows that a woman can transcend the limitations of her experience by using it as material for art.² Not only is that experience, after all, her capital as a writer, but she can understand what has happened to her only by making order of it in fiction, so what might, under other circumstances, be considered her limitation, becomes her passage to freedom.

“Revenge,” told in retrospect by the adult Rhoda, begins with the memory of herself as a child, sitting on top of the chicken house watching through binoculars her five male cousins running down a cinder track to pole-vault into a pit of sand and sawdust, an activity from which she is exiled because she is a girl. “I was ten years old, the only girl in a house full of cousins. There were six of us, shipped to the Delta for the summer, dumped on my grandmother right in the middle of a world war.” The societal expectations that put her at this distance from what looks to her like the most fun in the world were reiterated by her own father who, in his letter telling the boys how to construct the track on which they are to train for the Olympics, ended by instructing Rhoda’s older brother Dudley “to take good care of me as I was my father’s own sweet dear girl.” The boys follow these instructions with relish and refuse to let her help with building the track or run on it once it is finished. She is not allowed to touch the vaulting pole. As Dudley tells her, “this is only for boys, Rhoda. This isn’t a game.” Rhoda is supposed to be satisfied with playing with other little girls. In a pattern she is expected to follow for the rest of her life, she is to watch from the swing, or the roof of the chicken house, and sometimes from the fence itself, while they run and play and learn the discipline of trained athletes. As her grandmother and great-aunt point out to her, if the boys did let her train with them, all she would get for it would be big muscles that would make her so unattractive no boys would ever ask her out and she would never get a husband. Since she is bored to death by the little girl she is supposed to play with on the neighboring plantation, the only diversion she can find besides watching the boys on the track is learning to dance from the black maid.

So Rhoda’s first bind is being kept from doing what she wants most to do because she is a girl; it is the old “biology is destiny” argument dramatized on a Mississippi plantation. Little boys are encouraged to pursue activities that will prepare them for running the world while little girls are restricted to the domestic arena where they are expected to spend the rest of their lives.

The second bind, and perhaps the most pernicious one, is the fascination that this woman’s sphere comes to hold for little girls. It is so seductive that they can find themselves up to their necks in quicksand before they have felt the ground quiver underfoot. In Rhoda’s case, the seductress is her Cousin Lauralee who comes along and asks her to serve as maid of honor in her second wedding. It is more than a touch of irony that Rhoda’s mother had been matron of honor in her first excursion down the aisle. The implication is unavoidable that Rhoda is following exactly in her mother’s footsteps. She idolizes and imitates Cousin Lauralee and becomes engrossed in preparations for the wedding, trying on every dress in Nell’s and Blum’s Department Store in Greenville before the right one can be found. It is significant that Rhoda refuses to look at dresses from the girls’ department, she feels herself to be so much a part of the “ladies” world in this matter. And she is adamant in her insistence on the “right” dress.

The dress I wanted was a secret. The dress I wanted was dark and tall and thin as a reed. There was a word for what I wanted, a word I had seen in magazines. But what was that word? I could not remember.

“I want something dark,” I said at last. “Something dark and silky.”

“Wait right there,” the saleslady said. “Wait just a minute.” Then, from out of a prewar storage closet she brought a blackwatch plaid recital dress with spaghetti straps and a white piqué jacket. It was made of taffeta and rustled when I touched it. There was a label sewn into the collar of the jacket. Little Miss Sophisticate, it said. Sophisticate, that was the word I was seeking. I put on the dress and stood triumphant in the sea of ladies and dresses and hangers.

(121)

And so Rhoda, although maintaining all the while that she never will marry but will have a career instead, is caught up in preparation for the wedding, which she sees as a means of drawing the envy and admiration of the boys who have cut her out of the pole vaulting. If she cannot get their attention as an equal in their games, she will get it this way. As she later recalls the drive back from Greenville with her new dress, “All the way home I held the box on my lap thinking about how I would look in the dress. ‘Wait till they see me like this,’ I was thinking. ‘Wait till they see what I really look like.’”

The wedding itself is a disappointment. Held at the grandmother’s house, there is much less drama than Rhoda would have liked. But afterwards, at the reception, she does something that lets the real Rhoda out of the prison of the women’s trappings she has assumed for the wedding. Under the influence of a strong drink of her own concoction, she goes down to the track, takes off her formal, teaches herself to pole vault, and just as everybody from the wedding comes searching for her, she makes a perfect vault over the barrier into the pit.

In retrospect, she is not sure that anything she has done since has been of any real interest to her.

The girl is mother to the woman. This story with such two strong forces pulling at Rhoda, the male sphere with its activity and power on one hand, and the traditional woman’s sphere on the other, shows in a nutshell the difficulties that bright little girls of that generation faced. Gilchrist never implies that the experiences in the woman’s sphere are not fun. Rhoda enjoys choosing that dress and being a big shot in her cousin’s wedding, but she also wants to participate in the male world of activity and power. The dreadful part is that each area apparently excludes the other. Her choices seem to be as final as the choice of figs in Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. To choose one means to give up the others.

This is the “vale of soul-making” of the Southern woman writer; but as Gilchrist shows in the later stories about Rhoda and Anna Hand and in her novel The Annunciation, some women do indeed finally make it through to creativity. And they do it by accepting the validity of their experience and transforming it into art.

A good example of this is Anna Hand’s realization in “Anna, Part I” that the context in which she must understand herself is not the male world of power but an adult version of the domestic sphere to which the child Rhoda was confined, and that to order it in fiction is a way to control it. Creativity emerges from the trick of combining the two pulls: one becomes material for the other. Writing is the key to transcendence.

The exclusive nature of the traditional choices for a woman can be seen in the devastating effect of love on Anna, a successful writer whose creativity has been immobilized for ten months by an affair with a married doctor. She has fallen into the pitfalls of such a relationship with her eyes wide open; at the beginning she reflects that she has, after all, already wasted five years of her life on a married man and swears she will never do it again. But she is helpless in the face of love. She is getting old, and this may be her last chance at passion. The doctor, of course, never misses a beat in his career nor in his marriage; it is only Anna’s life that is disrupted.

Ellen Gilchrist’s opinions about the relative value of the choices Anna has made are implicit in the terms she uses to describe Anna’s coming to her senses. The story begins with Anna, having realized the folly of what she has been doing, calling her editor in New York to announce that she is ready to get back to work: “It was a big day for Anna Hand. It was the day she decided to give up being a fool and go back to being a writer” (20). “… I’ve wasted ten months of my life. Ten goddam months in the jaws of love. Well, I had to do it. It’s like a cold. If you leave the house sooner or later it happens” (221). What she goes to work on is a story about the affair, “How to ring the truth out of the story, absolve sadness, transmute it, turn it into art” (223). Then Gilchrist’s technique is to follow Anna’s prescription for writing this story; she begins at the beginning of the affair, noticing everything. It is obvious that the whole thing was hopeless from the start. Not only was the doctor solidly married with no intention of leaving his wife, but Anna knew all along that there were serious, probably irreconcilable differences between them. Yet during the time of the affair she did what women are supposed to do. She ignored the fact that his sentimentality embarrassed her, for example, and let her obsession with him completely dominate her life. Her love blinded her to everything else and induced her to give up her writing, which she acknowledges as the most important thing in her life. She even entertained the impossible dream that one day they would be married and live happily ever after. The incident that breaks the spell, in fact, is that one day, when they have not been together in a while, he comes over and they have such a good time she forgets he is married, thus breaking her one ironclad rule, never to forget where she is and what she is doing. Realizing that she has fallen to this level of consciousness wakes her up; within three weeks she is home again in South Carolina putting her life back together. In other words, she goes home to return to writing, to validate her experience in art and therefore to achieve transcendence. Significantly, Anna knows that this is what she is doing.

There is a way to organize this knowledge, Anna decided. To understand what happened. This love affair, this very last love affair. In a minute I will get out of this bed and begin to understand what happened. I will pick up the telephone and call Arthur [her editor] and then I will begin to write the stories and they will tell me what is going on.

I will create characters and they will tell me my secrets. They will stand across the room from me with their own voices and dreams and disappointments. I will set them going like a fat gold watch, as Sylvia said. … I will gather my tribe around me and celebrate my birthday. There will be champagne and a doberge cake from the bakery that Cajun runs on the highway. Yes, all that for later. For now, the work before me, waiting to be served and believed in and done. My work. How I define myself in the madness of the world.

(238)

At this point, she takes control of her life by climbing out of bed, sitting down at her typewriter and beginning to write. Her subject, of course, is what she knows best: the women’s world, the love affair and her survival.

Notes

1. Ellen Gilchrist, “Revenge,” In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 1981) 111–24.

2. Ellen Gilchrist, “Anna, Part I,” Drunk with Love (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986) 220–39.