Several months before her third novel appeared, Kaye Gibbons voiced anxiety over “the recent dispersal and watering down of language, the lost language in the South” (Wallace 8). With her (then) forthcoming work, A Cure for Dreams, she intended to “take the language back to a very pure time … the Depression,” noting that “the hardest part of writing … has been trying to create a whole community with everything intact” (8, 9). Create a community Gibbons does—a community of talkers in Dreams, and not of least importance, a community whose talk is largely represented through and controlled by women. The book's principal narrators, Lottie Davies, the matriarch, her daughter, Betty Davies Randolph, and Betty's daughter, Marjorie Polly Randolph, share the telling of their familial history, which ranges from Ireland's Great Potato Famine to December 15, 1989, and which extends also to the experiences of friends in the Davies' circle. Chronicling the incessant, overlapping conversations of these three generations of females who live on Milk Farm Road, an anonymous farming borough in North Carolina, A Cure for Dreams projects women who talk to each other, talk about each other, gloss old phrases, name their children, weave fictitious accounts of “what really happened,” write poems, critique men's letters, and read one another's bodies.

Of the three narrators, Lottie in particular uses words time and again to effect communal change: through elision she outsmarts Deputy Carroll in an unsolved murder case, by subverting racist labels she includes her black friend, Polly, at white folks' gatherings, and through tacit euphemism she “explained betting to women so they could have a little thrill on a Saturday afternoon” (64). Far from lingering in marginal spaces or shutting up when men speak, Lottie turns tricks with her talk to get things done, a feature also notably exemplified in her friend, Sade Duplin, the figure through whom Gibbons modifies Susan Glaspell's 1917 short story, “A Jury of Her Peers.” A Cure for Dreams replaces Glaspell's crazy, speechless, victimized Minnie Wright with Sade, a woman equally victimized, but one who maintains her wits and agile tongue even as she strikes back against a brutal husband. Simply put, Lottie Davies and Sadie Duplin contradict feminist theories which cast language as a pernicious, ultra-patriarchal mechanism that, at best, renders women aphasic and, at worst, strips them of their sanity.¹ Since Lottie and Sadie talk with intent and talk well, any discussion of A Cure for Dreams must attend to the productive relation Kaye Gibbons establishes between female characters and discourse.

In Honey-Mad Women Patricia Yaeger departs from usual feminist positions by downplaying women's speechlessness, addressing instead the ways female writers have created gaps in male discourse to insert meanings and revisions distinctly feminine. Opting for Hannah Arendt's philosophy of the “infinitely improbable” in language instead of Foucault's notion that the word/logos fundamentally restrains, Yaeger asserts:

Speech has [the] capacity to initiate, to interrupt and start things anew because speech is more than a function of the social order: the word can always be said or seized differently, can operate as a form of action. … To be able to act is to enter the flux and influence its direction.

(94–95)

Yaeger further argues that females possess both the aptitude and the tools to “rewrite [our] culture” and identifies “our need, as women, to invent language games that challenge and change linguistic codes” (29, 15). Most importantly, her theory of emancipatory strategies offers means for analyzing Lottie Davies's oral tactics in A Cure for Dreams. In terms of Yaeger's concepts and classifications, Lottie “wrench[es] … syntactic patterns” “into new shapes” and recognizes the double-life of speech by allowing her own and others' words more than one meaning (98, 103). Quintessentially “honey-mad”—a woman who “appropriates the language ‘racked up’ in her own body” and dares to shout—Gibbons's Lottie Davies exemplifies the type of female artist whom Yaeger commends for “writ[ing] new possibilities” (28, 15).

By and large Mrs. Davies ignores orthodox rules of grammar. Much to her daughter's dismay, Lottie fashions syntactic patterns to her own liking, declaring that punctuation constrains expression and therefore “[doesn't] matter” (26). Because Betty's narrative packages her mother's speech in correct grammar, Gibbons jars readers with passages of Lottie's jumbled-up writing; besides “renounc[ing] the apostrophe and comma,” Mrs. Davies characteristically clumps four or five clauses together before offering a period for rest (27). Consider, for instance, an example of Lottie's correspondence toward the end of A Cure for Dreams. As Betty angrily writes a letter to Herman Randolph, a beau who has joined the navy without consulting her, Lottie criticizes her daughter's note and “snatch[es]” the pencil to do a “better” job (147). Since we literally watch Lottie write what we read, the moment is highly ironic; in effect, Gibbons allows a character to assume the author's role, and, as author, Lottie crosses the borders of genre in a metafictional moment by writing in epistolary form. While Betty “just watch[es],” Mrs. Davies drafts the weighty document:

Dear Herman,

Just a note. I have heard this morning that you have joined the navy Swell Is this true? I'm telling you if you signed up to go to the navy you are going to hate it. You may not now sonny boy but you will later on I wouldn't think you would join the navy. My mother is very surprised and she thought I'd been going with somebody with better sense than to join the navy to be shot at in the water. Its not so smart to me either since everybody in the world knows you cant swim three feet. Although you may be mad about something you did not have to join the navy to get pleased. This is just what I have heard today so if you have not joined please do not pay attention to it.

Love

Betty

(147–48)

As in a former letter to Betty, Lottie opens casually with “just a note” before firing a series of arguments, managing to highlight her own opinions concerning Betty and Herman's misunderstanding (“My mother is very surprised and she thought I'd been going with somebody with better sense”). Lottie's second sentence, a run-on, establishes her sarcasm; she debunks the statement, “you have joined the navy,” by moving immediately to a judgment (“Swell”) and then to a question (“Is this true?”). The prevalence of S's and T's toward the end of the sentence generates a spitting alliteration, the sounds of which Lottie sustains by rapidly piling monosyllable upon monosyllable. Mrs. Davies uses this rushed, alliterative tactic throughout: of the letter's one hundred and forty words, only twenty-five are polysyllables, and phrases such as “hate it,” “not now sonny boy but,” “somebody with better sense,” and “to be shot at in the water,” maintain Lottie's precedent of harsh noises.

As part of her persuasive strategy, Mrs. Davies assumes a condescending tone toward Herman. Except for the letter's salutation, she never addresses him by name, instead calling the young man “you,” “sonny boy,” and “somebody with better sense.” And though initially Lottie doubts Herman's judgment, prophesying his regret over joining the navy (“you are going to hate it”), she later insults both his intellect (“Its not so smart to me”) and his physical competence (“you cant swim three feet”). Finally, Lottie seizes the opportunity to define Betty and Herman's argument as neatly as she defines navy (i.e., “be[ing] shot at in the water”), in that she interprets the young man's actions as a response to Betty, a response to some hypothetical fight over which he must be “mad,” and thereby ignores the possibility that Herman may have joined the military of his own accord. We find, then, that Lottie's letter denies Herman Randolph any dignity; she writes to intimidate her daughter's beau, to reverse his decision or at least convince him of his stupidity. However cruel, Lottie fulfills her goal of outcomposing Betty. After reading her mother's note and feeling slightly appeased by its bitter wit, Betty imparts, “[the] letter was as good as anything I could've written, and I'd forgotten he couldn't swim” (148). The written words that “refuse to be constrained by literary form” obtain for Lottie the results she desires (Benstock 88).

If Lottie Davies gets what she wants with a pen, her manipulation of speech is even more effective, perhaps because A Cure for Dreams resounds with conversations. Through talk Lottie avoids victimization at the hands of a husband whose “gristmill served as church,” directs Bridget O'Cadhain's stolen passage from Ireland to Kentucky, obtains the material goods she desires, salvages Charles Davies's reputation among her kin, and secures Milk Farm Road's acceptance of the impudent foreigner, Trudy Woodlief (18). Yet Mrs. Davies's communicative expertise rests as much with her ears as with her tongue. In listening to what others say, Lottie recognizes that speech may well carry more than one meaning, and she often responds with non-literal interpretations. When Betty lies to her mother, for instance, insisting that Trudy Woodlief “expressed … warm appreciation” for Lottie's donations of furniture, the matriarch shouts, “Phooey,” confident that an ingrate like Trudy would never “appreciate” gifts, much less appreciate them warmly (97). In short, Lottie Davies acknowledges that her own and others' words can lead what Patricia Yaeger calls “a double life,” that the letter at once “upholds the law” and “offers a path for wandering away” (103).

Gibbons's fifth chapter, “An account of things which heretofore were unsaid, or a lesson for the tardy,” traces the murder of Roy Duplin, a man generally despised as “a sonofabitch” who “treat[ed] his wife … nastily in public” (46, 40). While the deputy sheriff searches Duplin's yard for “bullet casings and footprints and all the other kinds of things a man would naturally look for,” Lottie comforts Roy's wife, Sade, who croons and cries at the kitchen table (42). As Mrs. Davies prepares chamomile tea and tidies several rooms in the house, she “reads” Sade's lamentations more loosely than had Sheriff Carroll:

[Lottie] had been to her share of funerals and knew the varying pitches of wives' wails, the sounds made for husbands corrupted with cancer, knocked down by strokes and heart attacks, bitten by water moccasins, or gored by crazy bulls. … When she heard Sade's very peculiar cry, she said to herself, This is neither the cry of a woman startled by death or relieved that it has finally come.

(43)

Considering various motives for Sade Duplin's outbursts, Lottie at last hears “a woman being afraid, in the main, of being caught” (43). The narrative continues, “Then [Lottie] knew exactly what had happened,” and methodically recounts Mrs. Davies's re-creation of Roy's murder, step by step. In Lottie's thinking, a pie with only one piece cut and unkempt stitching attest to a wife's fury with her husband; no woman eats a prized pie alone, the matriarch contends, until “pushed past her point,” nor does she sew “wild and uneven” stitches unless “distracted out of her mind” (43, 42). Deciphering Sade's behavior with non-literalist eyes and ears, Mrs. Davies constructs a possible chain of events that led to shotgun blasts and a dead man. Whether or not we endorse Lottie's style of logic, we must acknowledge that she reasons along broader lines than Sheriff Carroll, that she welcomes clues ignored by the law and opens up—rather than restricts—the meanings of “trivial” evidence.

Milk Farm Road's “Queen Bee” also grants multiplicity to her own words and actions (100). Quizzed over the travesty of her marriage, Lottie steps into Charles's shoes and explains how easily he could have misinterpreted his young bride. When Betty asks, “Do you think you ever said or did anything … [to make him] believe he'd found a girl who'd knock herself out working on a farm?” Lottie replies, “No. Absolutely not,” but then imagines her husband's point of view:

[Charles] knew I trusted him and would more than likely yearn for things to do in his favor. He also knew that I knew how to work because Pop drank like he did and left work to the women. He had ridden by our fields and seen me getting up fodder. … Charles rolled all these ideas and sights of me together in his hands and opened them again and saw me there helping him break field boulders with a pickax. …

(12–13)

Willing to admit more than one interpretation of words she uttered as a sixteen-year-old, of deeds she thought denoted, “I'm marrying you for love and rest,” Lottie allows her husband a degree of leeway (13). In fact, not only does Mrs. Davies accept words' double-edge, but she at times purposefully tampers with meaning. Determined, for instance, to buy expensive fabrics for herself and her child, Lottie “educates” Charles, misrepresenting her shopping sprees as self-sacrificing, economical outings:

Charles, the gingham was through the roof. Through the roof! So I did you a favor and bought this. I know it seems incredible that a simple cotton runs more than chintz. I could hardly believe it myself. … I'm not thrilled with it, but the gingham was high as a cat's back. … I don't mind going about gaudy to save you money, and neither does [Betty]. We're both glad to do it.

(16–17)

Hence Lottie lies if truth becomes an inconvenience or obstacle. On another occasion, visiting her kin in Kentucky, she twists tales of Charles's death to such extremes that the family regrets their loathing of the man (106). Betty remembers, “[my mother] told [her sisters] a very moving account of how my father pulled a rover from in front of a train, thus sparing the hobo's life and losing his own,” a version far different from Lottie's earlier description to Louise Miracle: “Charles was discovered upside down, straight upside down on his head with the river rocks on either side, like bookends” (106, 83). Lottie Davies uses words, splits them up and recombines them, to perpetuate the reality she wants perpetuated.

A counterpart of the speechless woman metaphor that Gibbons revises is the woman gone insane, a literary phenomenon exhaustively treated in Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. Summarizing these authors' position, Mary Eagleton notes that in the British and American literary traditions, a woman writer must accommodate criticism which labels her “unfeminine” and “presumptuous” for attempting the act of authorship; accordingly, she “is involved in a complex balancing act between apparent conformity to certain patriarchal literary norms and a trenchant critique of those same standards” (41). Gilbert and Gubar theorize that the “authorial rage and desire and antagonism” driving that critique are displaced in the image of the madwoman (Eagleton 41). But other feminists, such as Yaeger, question the ease with which women's studies has accepted Gilbert and Gubar's trope as “the” trope to characterize women's writing. In her introduction to Honey-Mad Women Yaeger charges that American feminists have “focused on women's discursive limitations,” and that we need, instead, “to establish a matrix of images that will emphasize women writers' empowerment” (18, 32). No doubt Kaye Gibbons agrees. In a novel that deals so forthrightly with women's relation to language, not a single madwoman haunts A Cure for Dreams; in fact, the only character to lose his mind is Charles Davies, Lottie's husband, a workaholic who commits suicide when business slows during the Depression.

That Sade Duplin escapes life in an insane asylum surprises both Lottie and Betty Davies, both of whom know “all the details of exactly how Roy [Sade's husband] was imposed upon,” or rather, how Roy was murdered in cold blood (41). For the plot of Sade's crime Gibbons borrows from and brilliantly recasts Susan Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers,” a short story adaptation of Glaspell's famous one-act play, Trifles (1916). “A Jury of Her Peers” traces the investigation of John Wright's strangling, a deed for which Mrs. Wright is jailed and awaiting trial. The story opens with the sheriff and county attorney escorting Lewis Hale, who discovered Wright's body, to the Wright homeplace in search of evidence for a motive. Two women, Mrs. Hale and Sheriff Peters's wife, accompany the group to gather clothes for the incarcerated Minnie Wright. While the men inspect Wright's bedroom, barn, and yard, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters uncover proof of domestic violence in the kitchen and sitting room. Among other items, the women find an unfinished quilt with a single block stitched crookedly (“the difference [from the other pieces] was startling” [335]) and a strangled canary, Minnie's pet. As Elaine Showalter observes, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters “recognize their own bonds within a cultural system meaningless to men. … In a moment of silent conspiracy, they resew the pieces and destroy the other evidence” that might implicate Minnie Wright in her husband's homicide (242).

Similarities between Glaspell's story and Gibbons's fifth chapter are striking. Much of the evidence in these accounts is identical (kitchen wares, food, shoddy stitching) and the suspect wife in each is covertly defended by female neighbor(s) from “the law” and “justice” (Glaspell 338; Gibbons 41). Minnie Wright and Sade Duplin both respond spontaneously, violently, to abusive relationships—Sade with a shotgun and Minnie with a rope. Moreover, just as Showalter describes Mrs. Hale's and Mrs. Peters's observations as “meaningless to men,” so Deputy Carroll's failure “to see and judge clean and dirty plates, slivers of cut pie, wild stitches, and wailing” has “more to do with the fact that he was full-time male than … part-time deputy and neither bright nor curious” (Showalter 242; Gibbons 46).

Gibbons's departures from Glaspell's plot, however, figure as significantly as the parallels. Sade Duplin, for instance, initiates Deputy Carroll's investigation of Roy's death, while Minnie Wright sits passively as Mr. Hale—uninvited—searches her home for Wright's body. Minnie, behind bars during the occasion of Glaspell's story, is physically absent as the sheriff and county attorney hunt for clues, but Sade wails at the kitchen table throughout John Carroll's probing. Sade also constructs an elaborate lie, a believable lie concerning Roy's murder (“Sade … reported about a rover her husband had run off from prowling about that morning, and in describing the man she was careful to describe a thousand men on the tramp” [45]), whereas Minnie answers Mr. Hale's questions with lines such as, “[Mr. Wright] died of a rope round his neck” and “I didn't wake up”—blunt, worn-down responses that Mr. Hale “didn't see how … could be” (327–28). And though Deputy Carroll never once doubts Sade Duplin's integrity, from the start of “A Jury of Her Peers,” Mrs. Wright stands condemned, with only a motive needed to set her trial in motion.

Gibbons's chief innovation in revising “A Jury of Her Peers” is salvaging Sade Duplin from the madness to which Minnie Wright falls prey. Minnie seems composed while Lewis Hale questions her—rocking quietly and calling “Come in” at his knock—but bit by bit Mr. Hale describes a woman “queer” and distracted (327). Compulsively “pleat[ing] her apron,” Mrs. Wright “laughs” inappropriately and digresses from simple-sentence responses to mere gestures (“‘Why—where is [Wright]?’ says I [Hale], not knowing what to say. [Minnie] just pointed upstairs—like this …” [327]). After twenty years of marriage and isolation, a woman who “used to wear pretty clothes and be lively” is reduced to a shadow that “just sat there with her hands held together … looking down,” a speechless psychotic who slips a noose around her husband's neck and fits Gilbert and Gubar's madwoman formula perfectly (332, 328). Sade Duplin, in contrast, keeps her wits. Betty recounts:

Neighborhood women took turns staying with Sade for weeks and weeks after Roy died. She was afraid to stay in the house alone, which with hindsight isn't surprising. We had all heard, Mean in life, meaner in death. Some nights Sade's companions had to dose her up with double and triple doses of paregoric to get her to sleep. Fear of seeing Roy Duplin or John Carroll either one at her window was more than enough to make Sade lose her reason, but she didn't.

(46–47)

Gibbons bends over backward to assure readers of Mrs. Duplin's recovery. Betty further describes how, after Roy's death, strangers would no doubt “put [Sade] in the category of women who chose a single life, who live in the same house with a cat or a bird or the like all their lives and seem to be so content with everything so still” (47). The cat and bird allusions to “A Jury of Her Peers” are explicit, but Gibbons points to her source only to reconstruct Glaspell's outcome: what symbolizes Minnie's dehumanization represents Sade's improved status.

Furthermore, the tale of a madwoman perpetuated in “A Jury of Her Peers” is displaced and delegitimized by Kaye Gibbons's analogous account. In Writing Beyond the Ending Rachel DuPlessis describes narrative displacement as a tactic whereby the reviser, in her remaking of a tale, shifts emphasis “to the other side of the story,” a side repressed or “muted” in the original version (108). DuPlessis's second strategy of revision, delegitimation, literally upsets the sequence of the original tale, “put[ting] the last first and the first last” to “rupture conventional morality, politics, and narrative” (108). If in the end of “A Jury of Her Peers” Minnie Wright sits jail-bound, biding time for the asylum, A Cure for Dreams restores a “clearer-eyed” Sade to the company of long-lost kin and a home renovated with Roy's hoarded cash (47). Moreover, opposed to Minnie's disoriented responses and wide-eyed gestures, Sade Duplin can talk—skillfully and convincingly—after firing her husband's shotgun; she lies to Sheriff Carroll about the rover, “press[es]” others to take Roy's belongings, and months later protests loudly against a man who deserts his pregnant wife (45, 46, 63). Insofar as A Cure for Dreams highlights Sade's coping mechanisms, and Sade's capacity to stay sane and direct John Carroll's investigation, Gibbons offers a fuller picture of the wife/victim/murderer than does Susan Glaspell, thereby enlarging sides of the guilty character which Glaspell's tale stifles. Gibbons also tampers with the sequence of “A Jury of Her Peers” in that she extends Sade's story past Minnie's experience; what occurs after Duplin's death is as crucial to the fifth chapter as the crime itself. More prosperous alone than when married to Roy, Sade “[makes] Roy's room over into a pretty little parlor” and enjoys gifts from her children (“boxes of stockings and sea foam taffy and a damask bed jacket and all sorts of other wonderful things”) who never visited while Roy lived (47). Kaye Gibbons appropriates the trappings of Glaspell's story, revises Minnie Wright's situation, and transforms an earlier feminist text's tragedy into Sade Duplin's somewhat tough-to-stomach coup.

A Cure for Dreams revolves on the transforming capacities of talk, from Bridget O'Cadhain's “Jesus, Mary, Joseph! Blessed Virgin, Mother of God!” which signifies Bridget's “oompth” in chartering a starved family across the Atlantic; to Trudy Woodlief's “Tell it!” which encourages Betty's social criticisms; to the midwife tunes Polly Deal sings, which outline proper birthing procedures (9, 10, 89, 168–69). No subject seems insignificant in Gibbons's wielding. From page one, where Marjorie Polly Randolph explains, “talking was my mother's life,” to the last sentence, “But I [Marjorie] wasn't sleeping, not for the sounds of the women talking,” Gibbons rewrites conventional assumptions of Southern history by offering a distinctly female perspective of events in a small North Carolina town in the twenties, thirties, and forties. If, as linguist Deborah Tannen posits, our lives are a “series of conversations,” we do well to follow Lottie Davies's rule of thumb in judging speech: “Listen and hear. … keep your ears open in a room with men and women” (Tannen 13; Gibbons 34–35). Certainly the women in A Cure for Dreams are strengthened rather than oppressed by words, with characters such as Lottie Davies and Sade Duplin serving as champions of linguistic know-how.

Note

1. The French feminists Monique Wittig and Hélène Cixous, for instance, emphasize women writers' marginality before the androcentric word; see Wittig's Les Guérillères (Trans. David Le Vay [New York: Avon, 1973]) and Cixous's “The Laugh of the Medusa” (Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 [1976]: 875–93). American feminists, though typically skeptical of l'écriture féminine, also rage against notions of writing as an essentially male enterprise; Gilbert and Gubar blast “male metaphors of literary creation” with cynical cunning, asking, “Is a pen a metaphorical Penis?” (The Madwoman in the Attic [New Haven: Yale UP, 1984] 7). And Ann Rosalind Jones suspects that “conventional narrative techniques, as well as grammar and syntax, imply the unified viewpoint and mastery of outer reality that men have claimed for themselves” (“Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L'Écriture Féminine’” in Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Mary Eagleton [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986] 229). For a thorough treatment of questions concerning gender and language, see Patricia Yaeger's Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing. My essay, in fact, was largely conceived in response to Yaeger's challenge that we “multiply the paradigms available to the feminist critic” in describing “what goes on in women's writing” (239).

Works Cited

Benstock, Shari. “Letters: The Post Card in the Epistolary Genre.” Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1991. 86–122.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Eagleton, Mary, ed. “Women and Literary Production.” Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. 40–46.

Gibbons, Kaye. A Cure for Dreams. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1991.

Glaspell, Susan. “A Jury of Her Peers.” American Women Writers. Ed. Eileen Barrett and Mary Cullinan. New York: St. Martin's P, 1992. 324–40.

Showalter, Elaine. “Piecing and Writing.” The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 222–47.

Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine, 1990.

Wallace, Marybeth Sutton. “Reaping Words: Gibbons Brings Words to Fruition.” Evening Telegram [Rocky Mount, NC] 23 Nov. 1990: 8+.

Yaeger, Patricia. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.