SOURCE: “Mary Gordon's Final Payments and the Nineteenth-Century English Novel,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Summer, 1986, pp. 213-27.

[In the following essay, Gilead compares the theme and structure of Final Payments to the works of Victorian novelists such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. According to Gilead, Gordon reinterprets the moral themes of canonical nineteenth-century women's fiction through the lens of contemporary feminism.]

Mary Gordon's Final Payments may be read as a study of the problem of female identity in a culture characterized by changing, often conflicting moral ideals and behavioral directives. As such, Final Payments considers what the Victorians called “The Woman Question” and, appropriately, borrows or alludes to situations, characters, themes, and titles from nineteenth-century English novels dramatizing similar psycho-cultural crises. But iteration requires difference as well as similarity. Gordon's borrowings of and allusions to the conventions of a prior novelistic era do not reflect a lack of literary imagination, but imply the Bloomian notion that literary invention and authorial self-invention are generated by strong reading one's literary progenitors. Thus, in Final Payments, a parallel emerges between the plight of the heroine, adrift emotionally and socially after the death of her father, and the condition of the contemporary “belated” novelist in quest of authorly identity in the wake of the great traditions of the nineteenth century and modernist novels. Just as Isabel Moore owes “final payments” to her dead father and the traditional moral and behavioral codes he had instilled in her, Mary Gordon owes Final Payments to the “great tradition” of such novelists as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, a tradition she must both incorporate and modify.

Isabel Moore's first-person autobiographical narrative follows the traditional pattern of the Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist's moral education is dramatized through a series of crises and transformations best understood as rites of passage. Victor Turner's development of Van Gennep's concept of liminality illuminates the multiple significances of dramas of transformation, whether social or literary. Detached from social structure, the liminal passenger undergoes an ordeal in which her or his structural attributes are lost; then is “re-born” into social structure, newly inscribed within its values, meanings, and role functions. But during the liminal period, the individual is free of classificatory systems, is “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” Though enacting a ritual process which will ultimately affirm law, custom, and convention, the passenger may, paradoxically, embody a critique of aspects of social structure. The numerous orphan-narratives of the nineteenth century novel are liminal in precisely this way. The orphan-protagonists of Dickens, Eliot, the Brontës and others are exiles or outsiders with respect to ordinary society, and as such dramatize a serious questioning of the mores, ideals, traditions, and power-structures of that society; but these orphan figures undergo transformations which are representative and symbolic of social and cultural change, and thus imply the possibility of reconciliation between the dissatisfied, disenfranchised, rebellious, or “lost” individual and a society whose injustices and constraints are revealed as ameliorating and thus tolerable: thus, the surprisingly conservative compromises that conclude originally critical novels like Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, and Middlemarch.

Isabel Moore as fictional-autobiographical subject and narrator combines the character-attributes of the typical Victorian orphan-protagonist with those of the Austenian narrator. Isabel's narration reveals a self-critical, analytical, clear-thinking mind articulated in elegant, lucid prose. Descendant not only of the Austenian narrator but also of such Austenian heroines as Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot, Isabel's fine intelligence is particularly apt in perceiving the nuanced meanings of social behaviors, styles, clothing, body positions and movements, and facial expressions; and, what convention forbad Austen, in discussing with modern frankness the life of the body （there is delicious mockery both of contemporary interior decor and of Austen in Isabel's observation that her gynecologist's office “would have been a perfect setting for Pride and Prejudice”). As orphan, Isabel, like her Victorian predecessors, bears a more ambiguous relationship to her social environment and cultural heritage that does either the Austenian heroine or the modernist alienated anti-hero. Like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp, and other displaced persons in Victorian fiction, Isabel in her initial orphaned condition metaphorically expresses the inadequacy of the moral, social, and psychosexual givens of her traditional upbringing, of her father's and her community's narrow and unreflective conservatism. Yet, like her Victorian ancestors, the very modes in which she conceives and enacts her rejection of that conservatism are permeated by it, and necessitate not flight from but a series of painful confrontations with her past, confrontations which constitute the “final payments” she finds so difficult to make. Isabel's new life is based precisely on those principles and values her father and his world abhorred or misunderstood （social welfare, female independence, sexual liberty, self-actualization）. But her newly won freedom leads to what Isabel cannot help but interpret as a reenactment of her sexual crime of eleven years ago, in guilty reaction against which she became her community's exemplar of its conservative religious and social ideals. In forging a new life, Isabel seems destined to reinscribe upon it the patterns of the old. Isabel, like many of the heroes and heroines of Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and the Brontës, is a victim of the paradoxical mechanisms of guilt, by which intense desire for freedom and pleasure is bred in a life constrained by narrow ideology and limited social experience; but acting on that desire produces the self-punishing guilt which binds the actor even more tightly to the ideological and social constraints she had sought to overcome. The efforts to surmount value-conflicts only exacerbate them. New values, principles, and behaviors cannot simply replace the old; rather, a new formula must be found which can accommodate elements from both old and new. As discussed above, such formulae often underlie the ambiguous “compromise” endings of Victorian novels, and characterize the novels' particular mode of liminality.

Final Payments begins in the traditional fashion of the Victorian novel at a scene of orphaning （as do, for example, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights） in which the absence, death, or impotence of the father implies a whole range of social, cultural, and psychological problems, tentative solutions to which are enacted in the orphaned daughter's or son's liminal processes of mourning, wandering, ordeal, and transformation. Like the sons, the daughters are in quest of a stable social identity, tolerable gender self-concept, and source of moral authority, but are doubly dispossessed, by changing and unstable social structures and codes; and by the patriarchal nature of both traditional and modern culture. Like its Victorian predecessors, the beginning of Final Payments rehearses the heroine's generic, paradigmatic identity crisis whose deferred solutions form the ensuing narrative. For the first few paragraphs, all we know of the orphan-narrator is the fact of orphaning. The reader does not learn the narrator's gender, name, or age, as if the narrator is deprived even of the basic elements of identity-formation. The recounted inability to weep at the father's funeral suggests the broader inability to mourn for a lost or vitiated cultural heritage. Completed mourning both expresses guilt for abandoning or questioning that heritage and transforms that guilt into greater self-knowledge and into the creative energy needed, in turn, to transform the fragments and shards of cultural endowments into usable forms: Isabel Moore's “final payments” to her father's memory and to all that it represents will complete her mourning. Moore's Catholic heritage represents traditional norms and values in general （as Catholicism does occasionally in Victorian literature, for example in Browning's “Bishop Blougram's Apology,” Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Charlotte Brontë's Villette）; the priests who were her father's friends and co-religionists image the benevolent paternalism of most traditional cultures—benevolence which is protective and formative, and to which its inheritor is indebted for the very shape and solidity of the self （however illusory that solidity later proves to be）. The traditional world of strong fathers represented at the priest-filled funeral of Isabel's father also recalls the passing of each individual's pre-Oedipal infancy, in which strong, idealized parents shelter and nurture the newly forming personality matrix. But the powerful claims of the past, whether cultural or personal, conflict with the need to adapt to change and to assert individuality.

Isabel as product of a “priest”-dominated community and family （her family for many years had consisted solely of her priest-like father and her father-devoted self） had lived out a modern version of the Victorian ideal of self-abnegating woman, who is indeed never “woman” alone but is always care-taking, felicity-making, comfort-bringing daughter, wife, mother, aunt; she is always primarily defined by her relationship to men. （As Mr. Wakem in The Mill on the Floss puts it, “We don't ask what a woman does, we ask whom she belongs to,” Book 6, ch. 8.） For eleven years, until her father's death, Isabel had played the angel in the house, leading a celibate and monotonous life, nursing her sick, then dying, father and indulging herself in nothing but a sense of her own martyrdom. His death fails to free her. The “murderous importance” she still attaches to her father even after his death is murderous in several related senses, suggesting a kind of belated Oedipal guilt for her relief at his death and at her inability to weep for him; murderous too in that her fulfillment of the patriarchal ideal of angelic femininity has murdered eleven years of her life, and possibly more in the future; murderous perhaps in that she senses that to free herself from the intricate, strangling webs of the past, of its guilt and self-mistrust, of its half-acknowledged desires, rages, and fears, will require an act of violence, a radical repudiation or reinterpretation of the ideals, authority-structures, and self-images that had heretofore sustained her. She realizes, “I would have to invent an existence for myself”—such an act of self-generation indeed implying the annihilation of the “father” that had engendered and nurtured her past self.

Like many Victorian literary heroines, Isabel had succumbed to the addictive lures of self-sacrifice: “the day Dr. MacCauley told me about my father's stroke was of my whole life the day I felt most purely alive” because “certainty was mine; and purity; I was encased in meaning like crystals.” But such achieved clarity of meaning also conceals acts of murder. Isabel's martyr's purity freezes nearly to death her ambition, egoism, rage, and sexuality, for all of which she is unable to find legitimate means of expression. Grasping at the opportunity for expiatory self-sacrifice, Isabel had sought in “visible martyrdom” to obliterate the humiliating memory of her father's having caught her, three weeks before his stroke, in bed with a man. Unlike such Victorian martyrs and near-martyrs as Dorothea Brooke, Jane Eyre, Amelia Sedley, and Lily Dale, Isabel with her Austenian analytical skill and post-Freudian conceptual framework is capable of sophisticated interpretations of her own motives. For example, she speculates on the possibility of having constructed, unconsciously, “the scene that would forbid me marriage during my father's lifetime, that would make impossible the one match he might have approved. … It is clear to me now that what I most feared was the possibility of my father's and my relationship becoming ordinary, or even assuming a texture that might seem comprehensible to an onlooker who had not known us all our lives.” But Isabel's analytical superiority affords her no immediately discernible benefits; she seems as destined to “err,” in the double sense of the word, as her nineteenth-century predecessors; better able than they to articulate the nature of her moral, emotional, and sexual problems, she is not better able to solve them.

The dispossessed orphans of nineteenth-century fiction find partial or provisional solutions to their individual problems of identity and to the larger cultural problems by revising the available models for selfhood, and thus both generating individuality and retaining links to the collective past. Similarly, both Mary Gordon as author and Isabel Moore as character/narrator revise their precursor texts in order to formulate their own. Isabel's most problematic relationships （those that reveal her insecurity and confusion） are with men; but in the histories of her relationships with women, Isabel quests for an adequate model of self; just as Gordon models her text on the texts of her literary predecessors, texts such as, in particular, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. For both author and character, revision and reinterpretation are strategies that prove creative, if problematic; for both Gordon and Moore, the sense of the past is a curious compound of intimacy, affection, and ironic resentment; the need to retain continuity with the past does not easily accord with the equally pressing need to avoid being crushed by the burden of the past. Final Payments is indeed, and in many important respects, modeled on prior nineteenth-century texts which it mentions by name; but it is far from being a simplistic or obvious revision of any one of them; the very fact that the text of Final Payments is imbued with aspects of not one but a number of prior texts suggests a complex intertextuality rather than straightforward influencing. Similarly, Isabel cannot simply model herself on a ready-made precursor—as for many nineteenth-century heroines, Isabel's orphanhood represents the absence of any fully adequate model of female selfhood, a lack which necessitates the heroine's ensuing narrative history as quest for such a model or for some personality structure otherwise sanctioned by either traditional or contemporary culture. The women of Isabel's past each represent a mode—at best, partially successful—of surviving in a patriarchal culture.

As in Jane Eyre, Isabel's self-narrated history traces her journeyings away from and toward the women who represent her own past as well as various options for the future. Margaret Casey, like Jane's Mrs. Reed, sometimes seems to be a kind of Oedipal mother who rivals, rejects, and breeds guilt in her daughter, and who has mysteriously and nightmarishly usurped the original good mother's place. At a broader level of symbolism, such meanly conventional-minded, ignorant, jealous “stepmothers” are dangerous doubles of their “daughters,” threatening in that they represent a prevalent type of femalehood as ordained by a patriarchal society. As such, they embody a negative identity, subservient to strong, despotic males （Mrs. Reed is terrorized by the memory of her dead husband and slavishly devoted to her tyrannical son; Margaret Casey had been the secretly adoring housekeeper to Isabel's absolutist, “priestly” father）. Both Mrs. Reed and Margaret Casey are hungry for power of their own; the only power they acquire is that which they exert over those females even weaker than themselves （the orphan child Jane; the guilt-ridden adult-orphan Isabel）. Isabel, like Jane, is forced into a power-struggle with her unmaternal “mother,” a struggle which she can win only at the cost of guilt. For Isabel, as for Jane and other Victorian heroines such as Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Lucy Snowe, self-assertion, even when defensive, is for women always tainted with illegitimacy, and sooner or later generates its opposite, self-abnegation. Jane's childish rage at Mrs. Reed's coldness and cruelty toward her is an unconscious act of rebellion not only against what Mrs. Reed does but against what she represents: victim of a society which has consigned her to secondary roles, Mrs. Reed is also that society's enforcer. Margaret Casey is not only Mr. Moore's devoted housekeeper, she is the “creature” of the male-dominated culture he represents, a culture which defines female virtue in terms of domestic servitude but which simultaneously valorizes such “male” attributes as enterprise, ambition, individualism, self-aggrandizement, and achievement. Margaret bitterly resents and futilely attempts to quash Isabel's egotism, intellect, and independence; in turn, Isabel fears and loathes with a physical disgust Margaret's emotional, intellectual, sexual, and moral poverty.

As in countless Victorian novels, one's opposite, rival, or enemy is also one's double, a shadow or submerged self; or a criminal, libidinal, aggressive aspect of self. One recalls Orlick's symbolic relationship to Pip （Great Expectations）, Uriah Heep's to David Copperfield, Hetty Sorrel's to Dinah Morris （Adam Bede）, Madame Beck's to Lucy Snowe （Villette）. Isabel recognizes in Margaret the negative image of herself, the image against which she has constituted herself （“I invented myself in her image, as her opposite”）. But despite that insight, Margaret remains an embodiment of Isabel's deep-rooted emotional frailty, the guilt and self-contempt that is the obverse of her self-approbation, sexual vitality, and independence. Isabel can name Margaret as her haunting shadow-self, but cannot exorcise her: “She would come upon me, thinking she had surprised me, but she was not clever enough to be successfully furtive. … But she made me feel as if she had surprised me, as if she had found me with my hand somewhere shameful: in the cookie jar, in the money-box, in my own private parts.” And Isabel is repeatedly threatened by Margaret as specter of her own possible future self. Isabel's father's legacy is double: like many women, Isabel has received conflicting cultural signals, having been inculcated with a strong sense of her individuality and a desire to achieve; but also with the paradigmatic Christian ethic of renunciation and self-sacrifice, always applied with special force to women. As different as Isabel is from Margaret, she is aware that her father's traditional world has the power virtually to eradicate the first set of personality components, to foster the second, and has the power to see her as merely another Margaret. Her family lawyer and her close friend Father Mulcahy can visualize no future for Isabel other than that of “paid companion,” as one of the sisterhood of “good daughters who cared for their parents” and, if they were unable to play their ordained roles as daughter, wife, or mother, could be helped through the kindly offices of the Church to play surrogate daughter, wife, mother in some bereft family. Margaret had played, in Isabel's motherless family, a kind of debased governess. Like the many governesses in nineteenth-century English life and fiction, Margaret's role was anomalous, in the family yet not of it. Isabel, after her father's death, is faced with a similar anomalousness, and thinks of her situation in nineteenth-century terms: “If it were the nineteenth century, I'd have become a governess.” Among her almost nonexistant professional qualifications is her capacity for devotion: “What a nineteenth century phrase, ‘that young woman was devoted to her father.’ In the nineteenth century, it would have had a resonance; now, devotion was something dogs had.”

Isabel's final confrontation, discussed below, with her Margaret-double will be Isabel's most critical, liminal ordeal, but Margaret is not Isabel's only significant double. As for Jane Eyre, Isabel's relationships with women form a strangely assorted sisterhood symbolizing a complex self, at once fragmented, conflicted, and in process of change. Isabel is flanked by two girlhood friends, dramatically contrasted with each other, yet both representing Isabel's quest for continuity with the past. Liz and Eleanor, like many pairs of women in nineteenth-century literature, are dark versus light （like Ivanhoe's Rebecca and Rowena, The Woman in White's Marion and Laura, The Mill on the Floss's Maggie and Lucy）. Typically, the dark-haired woman is characterized by dangerous or excessive vitality, intelligence, passion, or ambition, whereas the light-haired woman tends to be passive, frail, conventional, and submissive. In Jane Eyre, salient aspects of such contrasting feminine types are present in two of Jane's associates, flanking her in allegorical fashion, Bertha Mason Rochester and Helen Burns. Jane's symbolic journeys leave a succession of houses of the past, with their binding structures of anticipation, routine, and memory; as Jane travels from Gateshead to Lowood to Thornfield to Marsh End to Ferndean, she confronts aspects of herself, each confrontation generating a transformative ordeal. At Lowood School, Jane admires, then emulates, then mourns the frail martyr Helen Burns, who represents in extreme form Jane's “Jane” self, guilt-prone, life-mistrusting, secretly resentful, and self-destructive. At Thornfield, Jane encounters Bertha, the dark-haired, corpulent, powerfully built madwoman in the attic and monstrous version of Jane's “Eyre” （eerie, airish） self. Isabel's Liz is dark haired, energetic, and passionate. She hammers a six-foot long post into the ground for the barn she is building to house her pregnant mare; she adores her female lover; she swims, rides, plays tennis, climbs mountains. Unlike Bertha, however, Liz is witty, tough, and precise. Despite her excessive vitality, she seems a kind of latter-day Elizabeth Bennet living in a parodied version of Pemberley. Liz “was capable of a fine malice; she had a cutting edge like a good French knife.” Liz attributes to both herself and to Isabel “elegant perceptions like heroic couplets.” However, Liz's version of Austenian “regulated hatred” is enriched by her awareness of her un-Austenian potentiality for rage and violence. In contrast, Eleanor is gentle, sexually fearful （“I feel much cleaner when I'm chaste”）, and delicately blond （“she had the kind of face that would have driven a Victorian paterfamilias to strangled fantasies”）. Liz feels contempt for Eleanor's fragility and passivity; Eleanor fears Liz's sharpness and sarcasm. But the tension between the two also represents Isabel's inner confusion and polarization. Indeed, the three names suggest this, the first syllable of “Isabel” repeated in the “iz” of Liz; the last syllable of “Isabel” repeated in the “el” of Eleanor.

Like Jane Eyre, Isabel's visits at the houses of her female doubles generate further symbolic journeys. Eleanor's apartment is tiny, tidy, and comfortable, an apt emblem for the reduced, almost miniaturized existence Eleanor has invented for herself perhaps as a kind of therapy for the emotional wounds sustained during her divorce, perhaps also as emblem of a defensively avoidant mode of coping with a brutal world. Eleanor, then, represents a passive-defensive model of personality which is a real potentiality within Isabel. Isabel is attracted to Eleanor and to the cosily domestic and male-free life Eleanor offers her ＼Eleanor: “I had worked out an elaborate fantasy that you'd get an apartment near here, and we'd meet for lunch, and go to concerts and take walks”］. But Isabel is also attracted to Liz and to Liz's house, the structure of self-meanings comprising passionate engagement with life, emotional risk-taking, and self-assertion. Isabel's stay at Eleanor's apartment is enjoyable but brief, and functions as a stepping-stone to the more significant visit with Liz, which leads to Isabel's new job and an apartment of her own: to a provisional, newly furbished set of social and private roles. Both Eleanor and Liz take Isabel shopping for new clothes, during which, naturally enough, Isabel faces her image in a mirror. As in similar “resartus” episodes in Jane Eyre （such as Jane's uneasy trying on of bridal garments）, Isabel is also trying on new identities. Isabel experiences, alternately, dismay and pleasure as Eleanor helps her purchase new underwear, slacks, blouses; as Liz lends her an ill-fitting bikini, then takes her to town for a new swim-suit （Isabel's “accidental” forgetting to bring her old swimsuit recalls Jane Eyre's “accidental” loss, when she flees Rochester, of her bundle of relics from her not-yet-assimilated past）.

Just as novelistic solutions borrowed from the conservative world of Jane Austen are attractive but inadequate （Liz half-jokingly offers Isabel the role of “aunt to the kids, a sister to me, a confidante to John. … Just like a Jane Austen novel”）, so Isabel's bonds with women, necessary though they be, do not in themselves generate a complete self. Isabel needs to confront the male-dominated, larger-scaled public realm. Yet feminine bonding in Final Payments is not merely a regressive, deprived alternative to the social realities invented and legitimized by males; rather, such bonding is both a necessary prelude to surviving confrontation with patriarchal society and an equally necessary supplement to it. Both Liz and Eleanor—despite their intelligence, insight, and warmth—offer Isabel role-models which are only partially successful. Despite their differences in style and appearance, they reveal similar strategies for survival in a society which remains inimical to them and whose limitations they cannot fully overcome. Liz's lesbianism and Eleanor's celibacy imply rejection of conventional gender roles. Yet in other ways, their lives are based on acceptance of things as they are. Liz, despite her high-level energy, critical eye, and lucidity, leads a life which is only slightly less cloistered than Eleanor's. Liz and Eleanor remind the reader also of the provisional solutions to “The Woman Question” in the world of the Victorian novel, and remind us too of the tenuousness of these solutions. In this respect, Liz is a belated version of what might be termed the “domestic” solution; Eleanor, of the “independent spinster” solution. Liz's domesticity is like but even more unlike, say, Dorothea Brooke's marriage to the politically active Ladislaw （Liz's early respect for her politician husband has become contempt and dislike）. Eleanor's life recalls but also questions the value of the lives evolved by such spinster-survivors as Lucy Snowe, Nelly Dean, Madame Beck, and Lily Dale. Liz is trapped on her lovely country estate; her relationship with Erica appears doomed. Eleanor is trapped in her apartment. Thumbnail descriptions of their lives imply triviality and loneliness: Isabel observes, “Liz reads a lot of eighteenth-century history and she's building a barn.” Eleanor responds, “And I take baths and read ‘The New York Times.’” Thus, like Helen Burns and Bertha Mason Rochester respecting Jane Eyre, Liz and Eleanor function symbolically as threatening doubles as well as sisterly parallels to Isabel.

The description of Isabel's old house represents her past life as good daughter and her present lack of self-knowledge and self-respect: cluttered, dusty, uncared for, it had always measured her inadequacy in conventional feminine domesticity, but also her uniqueness as her father's spoiled, beloved, intellectual daughter—free of cares and skills ordinarily defined as feminine, but haunted by their lack. Isabel's remorse at her “own neglect of the house and its considerable spaces” （“I sat in the middle of the floor, weeping. I wept for my failure of love for the house that had kept me since childhood”） mourns the irrevocability of the past and laments her present uncertainty. A paragraph beginning with her house becomes a paragraph about her person:

I could have taken care of the house. I could have learned a language or knitting. I could have kept a journal or written a history. For all these years I was a servant to bodies, my father's body and my own, which had spread and softened from languor and neglect. I was always terribly tired.

Isabel's new job, fittingly, requires her to inspect private homes wherein aged individuals are cared for. Each inspection of these physical, emotional, and social structures in some way alters her own. Each visit re-enacts her own years of nursing her dying father, but now she plays the role of observer, a role which symbolizes her gradual adopting of new perspectives on her past. The penultimate house she visits, the Kiley's, most clearly signals her own disordered emotional and moral state. The house and its inmates are nightmarish versions both of Isabel's past life with her father and of her forthcoming sojourn with Margaret. The house features garbage on the lawn, a broken window, the pervasive smell of cat dung; Patricia Kiley, the caretaking daughter, is a twenty-eight-year-old version of what Isabel secretly fears she deserves to become （and will become at Margaret's house）, a selfless woman. Patricia has no front teeth （“the mouth of an old woman”）, dead eyes, pendulous breasts, a bad complexion. Her mother is “twisted excruciatingly” in a wheelchair, also has no teeth, and, like Isabel's father, her face sags on one side. Like Margaret, although literally, Mrs. Kiley's life is paralyzed and hopeless. The piles of magazines all over the house remind Isabel of her old house: “I understood how Patricia Kiley had let her life become like this. … I understood perfectly, because it was only luck that I had never looked like that girl, and that I read different magazines”—luck she seeks to eradicate by sacrificing herself for Margaret.

Patricia adumbrates Isabel's self-willed transformation into selflessness. As Margaret's care-taker, Isabel neglects herself, gets fat （her own breasts become pendulous）, regresses to the simple orality of secret gluttony. But this flight from her married lover, Hugh Slade, and from the pain and guilt caused by their relationship, becomes, as does Jane's flight from Rochester, a liminal ordeal, a slow gathering of forces preparatory to a future transformation which will dramatize her growing maturity, courage, and independence. Jane's ordeal is precipitated by her encounter with the unlikely double, Bertha; Isabel's, by a very different though equally unlikely double, who like Jane's is also her lover's wife. Cynthia Slade, Isabel's rival, is nearly a point for point contrast, blond and stiff-haired, Protestant, middle-aged, and vulgar. Her crude denunciation of Isabel's affair with Hugh articulates Isabel's latent self-dislike, guilt, and the legacy of her father's values. In fact, Cynthia's presence is that of an accusatory ghost of the father, figuring forth the traditional moral authority embodied in the renunciatory doctrine of “thou shall not.” Confronted by Cynthia, Isabel is literally paralyzed: “It did not occur to me that I could move in any way to avoid her; it did not seem possible that I could in any way prevent her reaching me, her doing whatever it was she wanted to do.” As her father's daughter, Isabel thinks, “I could no more refuse my father than Mary could have refused the angel coming upon her, a finger of light.” In contrast, “as Hugh's woman … I would have to calculate each new face I came upon: would it be open to me, or would it see me as the thief, to be cast out?” Although both alternatives depend on a relationship with a male, there is a significant difference between them, the difference between “daughter” and “woman,” between the sanctuary of universal approbation earned by renunciation, and the uncertain life that questions accepted moral norms. As her father's nurse, Isabel “had bought sanctuary by giving up youth and freedom, sex and life”; the certain efficacy of past solutions to the problem of female identity is contrasted to “exposure” to future risk: “I saw myself as the public culprit, the woman carried naked through the town, head shaved, borne aloft in a parody of the procession in honor of the Virgin.”

In accordance with the paradox of liminality, Isabel can strengthen her shaky belief in her own self-worth only by acting out, once more, the contrary role of self-abnegating “daughter.” Isabel's description of her emotional situation appropriately draws upon the liminal imagery of darkness, falling, drowning, withdrawal, numbness, and death. Isabel retreats from life, risk, and choice and into the childish illusion of changeless selfhood: “I knew with my old childhood certainty that I would go on being like this. I was not going to change” （ironic, since she is undergoing critical experiences which will transform her not once but twice, first into Margaret-double and second into autonomous, adult woman）.

Isabel's flight to Margaret's house brings about a revised version of Isabel's “good daughter” years of nursing her father. As then, Isabel shops and cooks for the aged and helpless parent （although Margaret is not an invalid, she is arthritic, impoverished, and alone）. Unlike then, Isabel receives no recompense in the form of gratitude or love. Nursing the narrow-minded, censorious, embittered Margaret becomes for Isabel “a pure act, like the choice of a martyr's death which, we had been told in school, is the only inviolable guarantee of salvation.” But this purity conceals Raskolnikovian murderousness. At the bus station on the way to Margaret, Isabel sees a hideous old woman reading, of all things, Pride and Prejudice: “The old woman caught my eye and laughed like an animal.” Isabel's mental world is, at that moment, inconceivable in the terms of the Austenian fictional world. The incongruity between the illusory moral purity of her martyrdom and her actual anger and self-hatred is imaged in the incongruity of the repulsive Margaret-like woman's reading Pride and Prejudice, and in Isabel's violent fantasy: “I thought how easy it would be to kill a woman like that. You could lure her with coffee and doughnuts and then poison her or bash her skull in. To watch her die would be perfectly enjoyable.”

Symbolically allying herself with the old, the dying, and the dead; Isabel simultaneously weds herself to the dead past and begins to kill it, to murder her old “angelic” self so that her new complex self may be born. She begins turning into Margaret: “In this light my face too was gray. It was the color of Margaret's face.” She inhabits a world of death, of thick, exhausted, excessive sleep: “I slept too late every morning. And every morning I awoke as if there was a war outside, as if I had only to open my eyes to see the corpses and the shell-shocked wounded. … I feared a face outside the window, dead eyes looking in at me as I pulled out of sleep.” “Dead eyes” recalls both Patricia Kiley, Isabel's proleptic alter ego, and Margaret, her current double. The shell-shocked wounded and the terrorizing voyeur mirror her own psyche, severely wounded by guilt and haunted by the unassimilated past. She cuts her hair, unconsciously fulfilling a ceremony in rite of passage, at once sacrificing her sexuality and vitality, and preparing for future growth. Her new but antiquated “bubble cut,” combined with her thickening figure and dowdiness, make her a bloated parody of Margaret. Isabel re-creates herself in so repulsive an image that she is constrained to kill it, finally freeing herself from the hauntings of the past.

Isabel gains the courage to carry through that therapeutic killing only with the help of a secret literary sisterhood. Wishing to alleviate her boredom and at the same time please and educate Margaret, who likes reading cheap romances, Isabel reads aloud the great romance, Jane Eyre. At the fourth chapter, Margaret stops her: “All that stuff is old hat. … You can tell the person who wrote that was one of those unsatisfied women. Unfulfilled. I hate that kind of writing. It has no life to it.” Enraged, Isabel throws the book on the floor （perhaps inspired by John Reed's throwing a book at Jane Eyre's head in the first chapter of Jane Eyre）: “Who are you to criticize Charlotte Brontë?” The realization that she cannot, after all, submerge her own identity comes about when she finds that she cannot submerge her powers of literary discrimination. She knows, even though she had tried to forget, that Charlotte Brontë is better than Regina Carey. Like the child Jane Eyre, Isabel tries to suppress her fury at the meanly domineering woman in whose house she is living as an alien; but just as Jane's anger helps to free her from the prison of Gateshead, so Isabel's helps free her from Margaret's house—that is, from the guilty self-abnegation and self-denial that currently “houses” her personality. But Isabel is not merely acting out a revised version of Jane's narrative. Like both Jane Eyre and Mary Gordon, she herself is able to revise the received texts of her culture. Unconsciously modeling herself on the fictional character created in the feminist countertradition, Isabel also, but consciously, models herself on her own revised interpretation of a biblical text. Thus, she integrates her two heritages, the feminist and the patriarchal, the unauthorized and the authorized. Father Mulcahy, the novel's gentlest representative of the latter tradition, suggests how that tradition may be revised without being violated. He views Isabel's self-sacrifice for Margaret as a sin against the fifth commandment: “thou shalt not kill,” he points out, “means slow deaths, too.” Soon after, Isabel interprets the biblical text, “the poor you have always with you” to mean that pleasure must be taken “because the accidents of death would deprive us soon enough. We must not deprive ourselves, our loved ones, of the luxury of our extravagant affections. We must not try to second-guess death by refusing to love the ones we loved in favor of the anonymous poor.” On Good Friday, she interprets the death of Christ as symbolizing the inevitability of every death: “Christ had suffered in the body, and I too had a body. … Christ had been betrayed by His friends, but my friends had stood by me in a miracle of love when I had ceased to love them.”

Liz and Eleanor overcome their mutual dislike in order to act together as midwives assisting at Isabel's rebirth （which takes place, appropriately, at pre-dawn）; and Lavinia's job-offer awaits Isabel. A female community, loose, tentative, and unaware of itself as such is thus very faintly sketched. The early dawn when Isabel escapes from Margaret is “fragile” but also “exhilarating”: “The three of us laughed. … And our laughter was solid. It stirred the air and hung above us like rings of bone that shivered in the cold, gradual morning.” Isabel's reunion with Hugh appears imminent, but the final images of the book show Isabel's pleasure at the loyalty, understanding and sheer physical presence of the two women. Isabel's return to Hugh, like Jane's to Rochester, takes place in her own time and terms; but unlike Jane she will not be wholly defined by her relation to her lover. Equally significant are her friendships with women. Her “final payments” are, in one sense, the final exorcism of guilt vis-à-vis her own paternalistic morality; but are, in another sense, the novel's concluding, if understated, payment of praise to the sustaining power of female bonding.

Escaping from Margaret's house of death, Isabel effects a reconciliation, perhaps a fragile one, between contemporary liberal secularism and traditional Christian morality, just as Gordon effects a reinterpretation of the canonic nineteenth-century British novels by women, preserving elements of their structure and moral themes, but in an era of far greater self-consciousness in the questioning of patriarchal traditions. Isabel's problems in self-invention are paradigmatic for modern women in general and for women writers in particular. Like her Victorian forbears, Isabel is both beneficiary and victim of traditional religious, moral, and social directives and codes, and thus is faced with the imperative need to revise—neither mindlessly to accept nor mindlessly to abjure those directives and codes. Isabel's final act of interpretation frees her from the residual dead weight of the past because she has modified and internalized what for her are still usable aspects of that past. Similarly, Gordon fashions an authorly persona that is partly modeled on, yet not limited by, nineteenth-century literary traditions; that reinterprets, yet carries on and adds to, the feminist literary tradition, itself both canonical and unofficial, partly inscribed in the dominant “great tradition” in order to make itself heard within it, yet continually questioning its suppositions and principles.