it conflicts with his desire to return to Europe and resume his artistic pursuits. Redd’s inner conflict is resolved when he impulsively shoots a swan and simultaneously kills that part of himself that draws him to Paris. The intentional ambiguity of the ending poses the possibility that he is sobbing, not because he has killed the swan, but because he has destroyed the creative impulse that made him unhappy in Wisconsin.

“A Guilty Woman” traces a woman’s progression from a type of love that enslaves to the type that liberates. Evelyn Crowe is a forty-five-year-old ex-convict who served six years in prison for murdering her lover, Bill Fisher. Fisher had been initially attracted to her because he relished the challenge of corrupting and abandoning an “old maid.” Upon her release from prison, she is taken in by her friend Martha Colvin to live on her farm in Wisconsin. While living there, Evelyn is attracted to Martha’s bachelor friend, Dr. John Bolton. She resists the romantic impulse that is building up inside her until she realizes that the passionless life to which she had returned was a form of pride. No longer content to be a self-sufficient spinster, she finally allows herself to fall in love. Wescott finds a kind of courage in Evelyn’s flexibility, which he believed was discouraged by small-town America.

The short story that merited the most critical acclaim was “Like a Lover.” Like Lilly in “In a Thicket,” Alice Murray is an isolated girl who is mesmerized by a man, in this case, an older man named Hurst. Despite her mother’s protests, she marries him. The assortment of whips and clubs that her husband keeps in the house, however, terrifies her and drives her back to her mother’s house. She remains in isolation for seven years until she learns that Hurst is to marry Mrs. Clayburn, a widow. Even though Mrs. Clayburn believes Alice’s words of warning, she admits that she is unable to break the spell that he holds over her. For two months following Mrs. Clayburn’s marriage, Alice is tormented by ominous nightmares that foretell the woman’s murder. The story concludes with the appearance of Alice’s friend, Mary Clifford, riding frantically from the Hurst farm, waving her arms. Shocked by what she knows has happened to the new Mrs. Hurst, Alice faints and falls backward on the porch. Ostensibly, “Like a Lover” exploits the same kind of scandalous material that Wescott used in “A Guilty Woman.” The godlike power that the men in both stories have over women, however, illustrates Wescott’s belief, discussed in depth two years later in A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers, that the love for God is similar to the love for a man or a woman in that both forms of affection render a person completely helpless.

The Babe’s Bed

The Babe’s Bed, which is a thirty-five-page short story published as a book in Paris, is, in a sense, a postscript to the introductory essay in Good-bye, Wisconsin. Both were written after Wescott returned to Wisconsin for a short visit and concern an expatriated American who compares the Midwest to Europe. In both works, Wisconsin and the United States in general are found to retard the development of the self.

The story is told from the limited point of view of a nameless bachelor who returns home. As in other stories by Wescott, dramatic tension is created through the narrator’s conflicting impulses. The bachelor becomes so lost in fantasies involving his sister’s baby that he becomes detached from reality. He begins by imagining that the baby is his and then convinces himself that his married sister is his mother. The climax occurs at the dinner table when the baby screams at being placed in the harness that serves as its bed. The baby’s bed, which is the story’s central symbol, bears a close resemblance to the mental web that has ensnared the bachelor. Before he attacks everyone at the table, he realizes that he has been living in a fantasy world and directs his anger toward himself before he can do any real harm to his loved ones.

The Pilgrim Hawk

With the publication of The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, Wescott created what many critics have referred to as a genuine short masterpiece. The novella differs from most of Wescott’s previous fiction in that it concerns expatriated Americans living in France instead of rural midwestern Americans. The story is retold in 1940 by the protagonist, Alwyn Tower, who interrupts his first-person narrative to comment on such matters as love, marriage, religion, alcoholism, and individual and artistic freedom. The events that he recalls took place during one day in May of 1928 or 1929 in France at the house of Alexandra Henry, a great friend of Tower. The story focuses on the arrival of Madeleine and Larry Cullen, a rich, handsome couple from Ireland who arrive unexpectedly with their chauffeur, Ricketts, and Madeleine Cullen’s falcon, Lucy. For the most part, the action of the novella takes the form of a conversation among the four main characters.

As the Cullens chat about money and neighbors, it becomes clear that the hawk symbolizes the Cullens’ relationship and the Cullens themselves. Madeleine resembles the feathered predator in the way she uses her charms to capture and hold her prey, Larry, who is too weak to escape the hold that she has on him. Both she and her husband, however, are hawklike in that they are prisoners of their own appetites. Although the hawk is consistent with the bird symbolism in Wescott’s other stories and novels, it differs in the way it revolves, taking on different meanings in different situations.

Tower continues to attach symbolic meanings to the hawk until it comes to stand for himself and Alexandra as well. Eventually, he builds a tower of symbolic meanings that blinds him to the “petty” facts that constitute reality. The process continues until Cullen, in a drunken stupor, attempts to kill someone; Madeleine, who reports the event just before she and her husband leave for Paris, never makes it clear whether Larry tried to kill himself or Ricketts in a fit of jealous rage. This violent turn of events shocks Tower back to reality, enabling him to descend from the symbolic tower that he has constructed. He recognizes that the “whisper of the devil” is the fear that he has attached the wrong meanings to things in order to make life more meaningful.