SOURCE: “Gothic Conventions in Jean Toomer's ‘The Eye,’” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 20, No. 2, Autumn, 1992, pp. 209-17.

Among the scores of unpublished short stories written by Jean Toomer, a newly discovered one is unique in its evocation of terror in the Gothic tradition. Deciphering the facsimile copy is tedious and laborious. Comprising eighteen pages of typed manuscript, with extensive and numerous corrections on every page, the text contains strikeovers, deleted (and inserted) words and sentences, typographical errors, interpolated pages, and handwritten emendations often bordering on illegibility. A disturbing tale of violence, guilt, and insanity, “The Eye” unfolds as a psychological drama of two Victorian spinster sisters, Edith and Eula Ogden.¹ While the action focuses on Edith's steady descent into paranoia and madness, it also highlights Eula's character as the Gothic villain. In this way, Toomer explores the roles of evil and madness in terms of their links between personal identity and family relationships.

According to Northrop Frye's theory of romance, there are four primary narrative movements in literature: the descent from a higher world, the descent to a lower world, the ascent from a lower world, and the ascent to a higher world. “All stories in literature,” he declares, “are complications of, or metaphorical derivations from, these four narrative radicals.”² The descent themes, then, fall into two categories: those that suggest descent from one of the two higher worlds, Heaven and Eden, and those that suggest descent to a subterranean nether universe beneath the Edenic or natural world. As Frye defines it, Gothic fiction derives from the romance, although it represents a unique variation within its parent genre. In romance fiction the hero or heroine descends from the Edenic or natural world to the underworld in search of lost identity. In this underworld the protagonist undergoes ritual sufferings, culminating in a reclamation of identity. Following this achievement, the protagonist returns to the higher world and establishes a new Eden. In Gothic fiction there is a similar descent from the natural world to the underworld, in a quest for identity. Despite perpetual ritual sufferings, however, there is no achievement of identity, nor is there a return to the higher, natural world. Instead, the protagonist remains hopelessly fragmented in a demonic nether world of cruelty, evil, and terror. In sum, romance fiction represents a fable of identity, whereas Gothic fiction represents a fable of the impossibility of identity. The narrative pattern of “The Eye” conforms to Frye's Gothic fantasy paradigm, as the structure of plot dramatizes Edith's loss of identity and descent into madness.

The first stage in Edith's descent occurs when the sisters are children, long before the action of the story begins. In an intentional act, born of “sullen hatred,” Edith blinds Eula in one eye. As a result, Eula is disfigured and begins wearing an artificial eye. Recognizing her sister's guilt, Eula soon learns to use her handicap as a weapon. Indeed, she becomes an artful dissembler, skillful in projecting guilt and fear by means of her false eye. This stage continues into the present. In the opening scene of the story, Edith absent-mindedly sketches an eye, revealing her enduring, deep-seated guilt:

She let her eyes look straight at the pupil of the eye she had drawn on the margin of the letter, the lashes shaded and curled, the eye itself intense and vivid, like the great eye of some sin burning through one's flesh and fat, through the bone itself and the blood, into the soul

(p. 2).

Suddenly realizing what she is doing, she crushes the sketch in her palm, in a moment of fear and self-loathing. Periodically, Eula visits Edith to remind her of the “crime,” and on this day Edith ominously awaits her terrible arrival. Eula is a ghost figure, and her metaphysical presence, as symbolized by her haunting, ubiquitous eye, lingers over every scene of the story. Upon her arrival, Eula begins taunting her sister with memories of the past. Unable to endure the agony, Edith cries out and begs her sister to leave the house. This is precisely the behavior Eula had hope to evoke. Slowly, she moves closer and closer toward Edith's face, allowing the full force of her bleary, false eye to wreak its terrorizing havoc:

as she held herself solid and blank, Eula moved her head so that the strong light came down on her false eye that looked always ahead so that Edith could remember and see again that moment when it happened, her rage, her unthinking, stupid blow that was done for some sullen hatred and foolishness. She held her head so that Edith might take her fill of the deadly work, so that she might even hear the screams that were so terrible that people ran from their houses. She stopped breathing as she remembered her mutilation, her loss of faith, her loss of beauty through this senseless Edith. And as she remembered tears filled her other eye and rolled down her cheek and she pressed her lips tightly together but she did not speak out or cry aloud. Finally she said, ‘But even when you did it I forgave you, Edith. Even then I knew it would be worse for you than for me’

(p. 7).

Throughout the story, Eula's incessant (albeit feigned) forgiving is emblematic of her character, revealing her perverse and maniacal mind.

In the next scene, Eula decides to move back home and take over the household. Edith now locks herself in a bedroom, becoming a prisoner in her own house. Dressed in black satin, Eula's dark presence suggests the intrusion of evil upon an otherwise tranquil domestic scene:

And now as she waited, suddenly her eye changed and gleamed again in washed newness, and the pupil grew intense and vital, ravenous to find all secret hiding places, all false shelters, ravenous to penetrate the one earthly hiding place where a person might crouch in safety, the one roof that might conceal a tormented body from that melting terrible gaze of eternal light and its power of burning deep and far into the guilty heart

(p. 10).

At the close of this scene, she sits in a wicker chair near Edith's bedroom door, like a hound closing in on its prey. “She seemed to fall asleep with her wide opened eyes and alert ears, her lip falling and exposing her gleaming lower teeth and her pointed red tongue” (p. 11).

The second stage in Edith's descent provides an ironic counterpoint in the structure of plot. Here Edith attempts to liberate herself from Eula's terrorizing influence and create a newly guiltless, fearless identity. Set at night in Edith's locked, claustrophobic bedroom, this scene dramatizes Edith's anxieties as she sleeplessly endures the stillness, the quietness, the darkness. Yet during these bleak moments, as she stares blankly from her window, she comes to understand the universality of suffering, and how suffering must surely expiate guilt.

All people, herself, Eula—all people were reduced, their living washed out of them. Those who had struggled were the same as those who had been swept heedlessly on with no arm raised, no cry from within to push them above their futile lives. Those who were strong were reduced and from the weak all life was swept away, all traces of crime and guilt, the cruel hand, the small shaded eye. All were reduced together to breathe with the dark land, held together by the breath of wind that gathered constantly their particles. … Now they were all the same, one as good as another, mixed, reduced to their last particles

(p. 11).

With this realization comes the confidence to create a new life for herself, a life free of guilt and anxiety. By morning, she develops the resolve to confront the past and her guilt.

Following her “dark night of the soul,” Edith greets a new day, symbolically sunny and serene. She leaves her room and ascends the stairs to the attic. With its creaky, rusty-hinged door and its walls covered with crawling mice and rats, the room is terrifying to enter, yet initially she feels no trace of fear:

Her eyes suddenly visioned the walls covered with grey mice, working their claws into the rough wood as they lifted their loathsome bodies higher and higher, their stiff tails poking out behind, their round fat bellies pressing soft against the wood. And this vision that once would have made her cover her face and give a low terrible scream, did not produce even a flicker in her eyes or in her breast. She went on. Her body looked as if it were prepared, after this night, to meet any wild animal, any prowling beast that might have lurked since childhood behind the trunks waiting for human flesh to rend with its white, firm teeth

(pp. 12-13).

Toomer's animal imagery symbolizes Edith's fears and provides the link between her guilt and Eula, who is also described in animal imagery. As she reclines in an old broken rocking chair, her eyes focused on the ceiling, Edith becomes a transparent eyeball, being and simultaneously seeing her being in a moment of absolute terror:

She tried to close her eyes but they would not close. They stayed open. They seemed to open farther and farther until all her strength went into her eyes and she was one huge eye gazing at these millions of knots in the ceiling that were as brown and forlorn as Eula's hound eye that burned through any substance, any form, straight to the sinful heart that shrank from its crime

(p. 14).

The final stage chronicles Edith's loss of identity, her descent into utter madness. Following her visit to the attic, she escapes from the old house and flees to the train station, in route to Seattle. At the ticket window, she impulsively wishes her sister were dead. In another moment, her impulse shifts toward suicide. Fearing her sister's arrival at the station, she locks herself in the dressing room until the train, the Pioneer, arrives. And when it does, she boards quickly, hurries to her compartment, and breathes a sigh of relief as the train leaves the station. “She closed her eyes, soothed by the swiftness of the flying train. She decided, half in her sleep, to will the house to Eula, to give everything to her. Something in her felt eased. She would pay in money and property to right her crime” (pp. 17-18). Having settled this matter in her mind, she calls a female attendant for a manicure. When the attendant arrives, Edith suffers a complete mental breakdown when she discovers, much to her horror, that it is Eula, and so lapses into the insanity prefigured for her throughout the story.

Edith never regains the lost Eden she associates with the time before her crime. Her descent into the underworld of her dark and tortured past is symbolized by her visit to the attic where her ritual sufferings could have led to a reclamation of her prelapsarian childhood. Yet in Edith's Gothic universe no such reclamation is possible. As William Day defines it, “the descent into the Gothic underworld becomes a descent into the self in which the protagonists confront their own fears and desires and are transformed, metamorphosed, doubled, fragmented, and destroyed by this encounter.”³ Edith is destroyed by her encounter with the past, as symbolized by the artifacts she discovers in the attic, each of which is an emblem of her fragmented self. The school dresses, “clean but unironed,” symbolize the wrinkles in her sentimental character; the forget-me-nots on the leghorn hat, her inability to forget the crime; the decaying dolls, exposed to mice, spiders, and dust, her vulnerable, innocent self, exposed to the perverse pleasures of her sister; the trunks and school books she used in college, her previous attempts to escape Eula's terrorizing influence. Edith remains a victim of the past, as she descends deeper and deeper into psychic decay. No whole identity emerges from her search, even after she decides to flee to Seattle, where she hopes to begin a new life in the symbolic America of new beginnings, the West. Instead of a new beginning, she experiences a tragic defeat. As she sits in the train station ready to depart for her new life, she regresses once again to the private world of the closed dressing room to escape her sister's detection. And in the final scene she is roundly defeated when Eula's evil presence overwhelms her and she capitulates to madness in the closed room of her train compartment, never reaching the symbolically open American West.

Throughout the text, Eula is portrayed as Edith's powerful, imperious nemesis, the classic Gothic villain: both Edith's mad, evil double, and grotesque and demonic.⁴ Like Edith, she evidences signs of madness, although her insanity takes a different form; her insanity derives from repressed feelings of hatred for Edith and alienation resulting from her defiled beauty. These repressed emotions emerge as perverse acts of revenge, as she uses her “evil eye” to project guilt and terror. Over the years, she becomes possessed by perversity and obsessed by revenge. Like Shakespeare's Richard the Third, she is “determined” to prove a villain. Indeed, it is the alienation she experiences that creates her status as “other,” as pariah, as a grotesque who menaces and terrorizes Edith. Nowhere is Toomer's symbolism more ingenious than in his use of animal imagery to represent Eula both as a hounding ghost and as a grotesque, Gothic villain, intent upon destroying her sister. Throughout the text Eula is likened to a hound stalking its prey. Her eyes are bleary and watery, “like the melting eyes of a hound”; her “gleaming strange ears,” described as “long and smooth like the ears of a hound,” quiver as she surveys her surroundings; and her movements are imaged as “springs” and “pounces.”⁵ But it is Eula's “evil eye” that most clearly defines her as grotesque and as demonic, and that becomes the central symbol of the story.

The idea that one can project agony or torment through willful glances is a belief shared by many different cultures throughout the world. Anthropological studies agree in finding that the evil eye symbolizes aggressive feelings and the desire to destroy; its possessor reveals a deep-seated desire for power and mastery over another individual, usually a rival or enemy.⁶ According to Joost Meerlo, “being caught in the enemy's visual field is, as it were, the beginning of being attacked and destroyed. The victim is terrorized—stricken and immobilized. Indeed the eye of the predator often has a paralyzing and trapping influence on his prey.”⁷ The blinding incident, and Eula's subsequent acquisition of the false eye, transforms her into a masterful being, intent upon directing events with a glance. As Edith's guilt overwhelms her, powerfully assisted by her sister's calculated behavior and evil stares, Edith unwittingly endows Eula with supernatural power.

The relationship between the two sisters, then, may be described in terms of domination and submission. According to Day, the instability that derives from such relationships results in the creation of typically Gothic doubled identities:

The figure of the double transforms the self-other relationship into a self-self relationship. Rather than finding the Gothic protagonist isolated in a hostile world, we see that the Other resolves itself into a version of the self, a fragmentation and externalization of identity that destroys the self as fully and as surely as the overt attacks of its nemesis. … Because the self embodies within it both sides of the dynamic of all relationships in the Gothic world, and because the self manifests this duality through the creation of doubles, we can see that the encounter of the self with the Gothic world leads to the transformation and metamorphosis of the self into its opposite, either into the Other or its own hidden double. … Doubling, then, is not simply a convention, but is the essential reality of the self in the Gothic world.⁸

It is precisely in this context that we are able to understand the transformation and metamorphosis of Edith's and Eula's identity, for each of them possesses a dual nature that is reflected in the other. Edith is the protagonist and sentimental heroine, consistently portrayed throughout the story as fearful and submissive. Yet this personality is the result of guilt; she is the same individual who, as a child, coldly and intentionally blinded her sister. Eula, the Gothic villain who willfully torments her sister into insanity, also enlists our sympathy because she is the victim of a senseless and brutal act of violence. Both characters are therefore passive and aggressive, neither totally good nor totally evil:

Such ambiguous presentations are frequent in later Gothic works and are connected with the use of the doubled figures. Both aim at securing a reaction in the reader that is an amalgam of compassion for and horror of the figure of monstrous evil presented to him. Out of these mixed feelings comes the attitude of moral relativism that is perhaps the most important feature of the Gothic.⁹

In Toomer's Gothic world, every mind is capable of slipping into evil and madness.

That Edith sees Eula on the train in the closing scene of the story reveals Edith's complete degeneration into madness and hallucination. Here Edith's double becomes a symbolic representation of her own conscience, as well as a reflection of her own repressed evil, which she can not control. Toomer's handling of this scene is masterfully ambiguous, like the ending of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, as it leaves the reader wondering if Eula's presence in the train compartment is real or merely a projection of Edith's paranoia and guilt; Toomer heightens the ambiguity by suggesting that Edith falls asleep upon entering the compartment and that the final scene is sheer Gothic fantasy, a symbolic nightmare. In either case, however, Edith cannot escape her sister's menacing influence. As she awaits the arrival of the train, she impulsively wishes her sister were dead. Yet this death wish for her double represents a latent desire to destroy herself: “she planned to rush to the dressing room and lock the door, then climb out a window and wait until the Pioneer came rushing in and then throw herself down on the tracks in front of it. The thought of death eased her and she relaxed, sinking down on the hard bench as if it were velvet” (p. 16). Like Poe's Roderick Usher, who tries to destroy his twin sister and double, Madeline, Edith wishes to destroy that part of herself that ties her to a fearful and nerve-racking existence. And like Usher, she knows instinctively that the death of the sister-double is tantamount to the death of the self.

As with the sister-double, so too with the sisters' surrounding world. One of the most familiar of all Gothic conventions is the doubling of the castle or house with its owner, as in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto or Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher.”¹⁰ In “The Eye,” the Ogden manse, and particularly the attic, similarly functions as Edith's double, an externalization of her decaying self. The house, like Edith's mind, is haunted by the past and by Eula's ubiquitous presence. As Edith lives imprisoned within the closed world of the house, she also lives within the closed world of her dark and tortured mind.

Despite her efforts to maintain the house as it was when she and Eula were children, she cannot regain the prelapsarian innocence she possessed before her crime. When Eula arrives at the Ogden manse, she comments on her sister's attempts to retain the old house as it used to be. “Well, the house looks just the same, the furniture is just as it was when we were children” (p. 6). In the next scene, however, Eula changes the setting to reflect the present-day scene. “Now everything was like a party, just as if Miss Edith had never lived there,” exclaims Emma, the maid (p. 9). Edith's and Eula's comments on the past embedded in the house reveal an ambiguous attitude toward history, a mixture of longing and repulsion that is a hallmark of Gothic fiction. For Edith, the past evokes nostalgia for a time before the accursed crime began to destroy them. By contrast, Eula is repulsed by the past, as she associates it with the very origin of the violence against her. Diabolically, and paradoxically, she wishes to retain the horror of Edith's crime. Parallel to a vision of a prelapsarian past is the concomitant vision of a perverse and paradoxical present.¹¹

While there is no date on the Beinecke facsimile copy, and there are no intratextual references useful in dating this story, “The Eye” was very likely written between 1925 and 1929, a period when Toomer composed the group of unpublished stories that comprise his projected short story collection, Lost and Dominant (1929). This would locate this new tale in the Gurdjieff period in Toomer's canon, a period during which he renounced race consciousness in favor of “New American” democratic idealism. Throughout his career as a writer and philosopher, Jean Toomer explored the metaphysics of the self as a corollary of his philosophical idealism. Drawing upon his studies in Oriental theosophy, and later upon Gurdjieffian idealism, he consistently asserted a monistic vision of reality, in which opposites are reconciled as interactive entities, each blending into union with its antithesis.¹² “The Eye” uses this philosophy in formulating a poetics of terror, dramatizing the idea that good and evil, as well as sanity and insanity, inhere within the self in degrees of consciousness. This is, of course, a Romantic notion, as seen in Toomer's forebears of the American Renaissance, especially Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. “The Eye” allegorizes this conception of the self in Edith and Eula, both of whom contain within them the possibilities for evil and madness. It is this Romantic conception of the self, presented within a specifically Gothic literary tradition, that establishes “The Eye” as a significant contribution to modern American fiction.

Notes

1. Jean Toomer's “The Eye” may be located in Box 51, Folder 11 in the Jean Toomer Collection, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Further citations to this short story will be to page numbers only. Precisely when this story was written is unknown. For a bibliography of Toomer's published and unpublished short stories, see my “Jean Toomer's Lost and Dominant: Landscape of the Modern Waste Land” in SAF, 18 (1990), 85-86.

2. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), p. 97.

3. William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 27.

4. See Elizabeth McAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 81-82, for a typology of Gothic villains.

5. For discussions of animals and animal imagery related to the grotesque, see Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 57, 115, 152, 182, 183, 198, and 209. Kayser's comments on domestic animals, like the dog, and on vermin (p. 182) are especially illuminating for Toomer's uses of these images in “The Eye.” In this context, it is significant that “The Eye” was originally entitled “The Hound.”

6. For other studies of the evil eye phenomenon in light of its aggressive powers to destroy through empowerment, see Clarence Mahoney, ed., The Evil Eye (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976), pp. v-xvi; Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of Medusa (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp. 27-56; Lawrence DiStassi, Mal Occhio (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), pp. 15-60; and Frederick T. Ellworthy, The Evil Eye (London: Collier Press, 1958), pp. 1-25.

7. Meerlo Joost, Intuition and the Evil Eye (Wassenaar, The Netherlands: Service Publishers, 1971), p. 15.

8. Day, p. 20.

9. McAndrew, p. 99.

10. McAndrew, pp. 48-49.

11. On the importance of the past in Gothic fiction, see Day, p. 97.

12. For a discussion of Toomer's metaphysics of the self as a corollary of his philosophical idealism, see my introduction to The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer, ed. Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. ix-xxxiv.