Cynthia Clough
Cynthia Clough has a Ph.D. in English, specializing in the novel, from Florida State University. In this essay, Clough explores Mattie Gokey's need—and her hesitance—to find the unique story and narrative of her own life.
Early in A Northern Light, Mattie Gokey expresses pity for characters in novels who cannot break out of their stories and change their fates. She fears that the same can also happen to people in life, and that she herself is stuck in a relentless story that no amount of ambition, hope, or courage can help her escape. Her mother will haunt her all her life if she breaks the promise she made at her mother's deathbed to help raise her sisters. Pa needs her to run the house; the farm is losing profits since older brother Lawton ran away; who else can tend the cooking, the laundering, and other chores? And if her binding commitments to home and family will not prevent her from accepting a scholarship to Barnard College, maybe the flush of first love will be the force that will carry her straight to marriage with Royal Loomis, who is ready to settle down and start a farm of his own. Several of Mattie's friends have already succumbed to marriage. It's her turn; and it's her time, although she never had imagined that such a handsome and capable man would ask for her hand.
What makes the novel such a compelling read is how convincingly Jennifer Donnelly renders the conflicts in Mattie's emotional life as she navigates her way toward her decision to go to college. The reader may see it as the only viable choice for the young woman; we may root for her to cast off her shackles and board the train for the big city, but still the pull of the alternative remains disturbingly real. According to an article in The Bookseller, the author expressed that her intention was to sustain the plausibility of both choices as viable for Mattie; as a modern woman writing from another era, she had felt some regret that her career had forced her to postpone marriage and family for so long. The novel is so universally appealing because of the timelessness of the central dilemma. But the tension is not merely a matter of choosing between this and that alternative in life. It speaks to the difficulty people have in breaking out of the cultural narratives imposed on their lives, the myths and stories that define their identities and map out for them the rites of progress. For Mattie, the narratives that are both shaping and impeding her progress come from several sources, including her literary inheritance, her mother's history, the alternative choices Miss Wilcox is urging her to explore, and the story of Grace Brown, which ultimately has the power to liberate her.
Mattie's foundations as a reader come from the books her mother and aunt had to offer, namely the Waverly novels and Peterson's Magazines that still fill the shelves of the Gokey household. Mattie's mother was an avid reader, and was in fact described as eloping with Pa carrying a carpetbag filled with books rather than clothes (the same carpetbag, by the way, that Mattie will take when she strikes out for New York). The books that her mother brought to the marriage were the conventional Victorian narratives offering larger-than-life examples of how a woman should live and behave in order to sustain the Victorian ideal. During the era of the Bildungsroman (novel of self development), women did turn to literature to learn how to live, to...
(This entire section contains 2486 words.)
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find example and instruction. The heroic biography was prevalent—lives polished to a shining ideal—and periodicals were saturated with edifying articles on morals and manners. When Mattie consults Aunt Josie'sPeterson's Magazine for instruction on how to behave around Royal, she, like her mother before her, is capitulating to the era's prevailing notion that an individual comes to full selfhood only through emulating the ideal, and the ideal is imparted through example and instruction.
Mattie's mother elopes with a carpetbag full of books because she knows she will need them to become an adequate, perhaps exemplary, wife and mother. Mattie, however, considers her rather heroic and ambitious, and assumes her mother read for the same reasons she herself does. To some extent Mamma does share Mattie's native love of language and was responsible for cultivating it in her daughter, she encourages Mattie and is entirely supportive of her earning a high school diploma. Still, it is clear that Mamma is less concerned with Mattie fulfilling her gifts and ambitions than she is anxious to offer her instruction and perhaps the companionship of books that will help her survive her destiny as a farm wife. Mamma must recognize the wild, rebellious side of Mattie as something she, too, once possessed and learned to harness through proper guidance. She would not have felt so compelled to exact the deathbed promise from Mattie had she not sensed the strength of Mattie's desire to break away and deemed it inappropriate. Mamma knew that staying would be a struggle for Mattie, a struggle that would require the help of edifying literature.
Miss Parrish, Mattie's first teacher at the Inlet Common School, is likewise an arbiter of the Victorian ideal. She tries to instill in Mattie her belief that the proper function of literature is to uplift the spirit and be "cheerful and inspiring"; she also tells Mattie that her stories are morbid and dispiriting. Mattie is influenced enough by Miss Parrish's beliefs to toss her composition book in the woods. Through the intervention of Miss Wilcox, however, she gains strength of mind to rail dramatically against the Victorian aesthetic, claiming that she will never write a story with a happy ending, because real life has no happy endings.
The darker, ostensibly more honest, literature that reaches her through Miss Wilcox and even Charlie Eckler may validate Mattie's rebellion against Victorian sentimentality, thereby pointing the way to fresh possibilities for her writing. At the same time, these books are hardly alternative guide books for navigating the terrain of adolescent longing and intellectual ambition. The novels that Miss Wilcox claims are more dangerous than guns stem from an 1890s movement known as naturalism. Naturalism sprang up when innovations in science made the universe seem suddenly godless and mechanistic. Naturalists believed that if there were a god, he would at best be a prime mover who had set the universe in motion and then abandoned it. He certainly did not have an intimate or moral interest in what happened in an individual human life. God had wound up the mechanistic clock of the universe and then left it to wind down in entropy, a slow downhill slide into nothing. There were certainly no happy endings for the naturalists.
For the naturalist, the self was a dark unknown. In 1859, Darwin had made his voyage on HMS Beagle and had written The Origin of Species claiming that man was kin to the apes. By the 1880s, Freud's theories of the unconscious were also becoming well known. Freud claimed that much of human psychological life was determined by unconscious motivations deriving from an inner entity called the Id, which was comprised of all the socially unacceptable impulses the Superego had stuffed down deep inside the mind. For Victorians, so much had been considered unacceptable that popular imagination made a veritable monster of the newly charted unconscious—an animal monster, part product of Darwin, part product of Freud. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) best illustrates the popular conception of the "other" that dwelt within us and determined behavior—the scientist and his evil, animalistic twin. Dualism and the notion that man's behavior was determined by forces greater than he was became the foundation of much of turn-of-the-century literature.
Miss Wilcox offers Mattie novels by Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola, two powerful voices of the naturalist movement. Mattie may be tired of happy endings and contrived examples, and she is certainly grateful to her new teacher for offering her a view of literature contrary to the inhibiting views of Miss Parrish. But as Mattie's story progresses, it becomes clear that the naturalist point of view does not mesh with her vision of reality either. Such a dark, deterministic view certainly cannot help Mattie learn to trust the impulses within herself.
A case in point is the novel Mr. Eckler offers Mattie when she boards his floating grocery/lending library. Mattie has just come from fiddlehead picking with Weaver and Minnie, and is dismayed over what a lethargic lump her friend Minnie has become in her pregnancy. Mr. Eckler greets her with news of a new book in the library that he has set aside for her: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the story of Lily Bart, naturalism's most tragic spendthrift who rejects suitor after suitor despite an inability to support herself and winds up overdosing on sleeping pills. Mattie is flattered that Mr. Eckler acknowledges her as the reader and writer that she is, which in turn inspires her to buy an expensive composition book. Mattie takes the sixty cents she has earned picking fiddleheads and spends forty-five of them on the fancy composition book. She knows she should not spend the money that her father needs to run the household. The Wharton book she holds in her other hand offers a caveat: take heed the spendthrift Lily Bart. Women who turn down opportunities for marriage wind up incapable of supporting themselves. They are doomed and we, too, may be doomed.
The books Miss Wilcox offers Mattie point the finger of doom in another direction, toward women who are victims of their sexuality. For women of the Victorian era, the dark other within was most often the sexual side of her nature. There were legitimate reasons for women to fear their sexuality. Pregnancy for an unwed woman carried irreversible consequences that led to her social and economic downfall more often than not. There was no place in Victorian society for a "fallen woman." No man would marry her and no employer would hire her. Many novels of the era touched on the social injustice of women ruined by men who seduced and abandoned them. Mattie mentions several such stories she has read, among them Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which Miss Wilcox offers as an example of the new writing.
In the character of Tess, Mattie certainly finds a cautionary tale that pertains to her own situation with Royal, whose social ambitions and lusty advances mirror Alec's in the novel. Tess's story also foreshadows Grace Brown's story, as does the Zola novel Miss Wilcox hands her, Theáreàse Raquin, which concerns a lover's triangle wherein Theáreàse conspires with her lover to drown her husband in a lake.
Miss Wilcox delivers instructing tales to Mattie warning her not to trust her sexuality. Miss Wilcox is indeed Mattie's champion. She has fought for Mattie by convincing her mother that she must get a high school diploma, and she has tried to convince her father to allow her to go to Barnard. Miss Wilcox genuinely believes in Mattie's gifts. As a mentor she is certainly Mattie's means to a viable future. At the same time she is in and of herself a mixed message, a fugitive hiding beneath a false identity and a poet regarded as an indecent threat to womanhood. One can certainly understand why Mattie, identifying with Miss Wilcox and her love of books, and even with the poems she discovers and finds hardly indecent, would be reluctant to entrust herself to the world Miss Wilcox urges her to discover.
Mattie sorts through the many stories that have been imposed on her experience while she holds her vigil over the corpse of Grace Brown, reading her letters. When Grace is first pulled from the lake, before Mattie has confirmed the identity of Chester Gillette, she imagines a Romeo-and-Juliet tragedy for the young couple. The couple was eloping; their parents disapproved of their marriage; they both drowned and were eternally joined at the bottom of the lake. Later she embellishes the story, burying the lovers side by side in a graveyard, giving it the kind of happy ending she has promised Miss Wilcox she will never write, "the kind that stitches things up nicely and leaves no ends dangling and makes me feel placid instead of all stirred up." She acknowledges that in order to come up with such a story, she must overlook certain aspects of things that have happened, such as the tearstained face of Grace Brown as she handed Mattie her letters. The corpse of Grace Brown lies in the parlor of the Glenmore Hotel, too palpable, too real to deny. Eventually Mattie does admit one dark piece of evidence after another until she figures out the truth about what happened to the young girl, but she is not content to leave her stuck in a story of bleak determinism. Her impulse is to make Grace's life count by preserving her voice for history and living to the fullest the life that Grace Brown has been denied.
Through facing the death of Grace Brown and the hard truths of Grace's life, Mattie is able to change her own fate, and live and write a story authentically her own. Ironically, the story does have a happy ending, but it is entirely original and uncontrived. She does not succumb to the rake Royal, but neither does she shuffle out of her circumstances leaving behind those for whom she feels responsible. In saving herself she is able to save others in her community as well. Freed from the conventional narratives of how things ought to be, she is able to see fresh possibilities everywhere. She envisions a new social order in which women can establish households with other women, black men can go to Columbia University, and racism does not beat a soul down. In her friendship with Weaver, there is a suggestion of the possibility of healthy male/female relationships based on common interests, shared enterprises, and mutual respect and support. Mattie sees the lawyer in Weaver and the sane person in crazy Emmie, and she sees how to make thirty dollars spread thin enough to help all those in need. Pa's mule is paid for and Tommy Hubbard comes to help him with the farm, she pays off Emmie Hubbard's back taxes so she and Mrs. Smith can have a home, and she also offers Weaver the train fare he needs to get to Columbia. She "stitches things up nicely and leaves no ends dangling," but each happy ending she helps to create is freshly coined and transcendent.
Source: Cynthia Clough, Critical Essay on A Northern Light, in Literary Newsmakers for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
In the following essay, Donnelly explains to Update how a century-old murder led her to write the Carnegie Medal-winning novel, A Northern Light." Note that A Northern Light was published under the name A Gathering Light in Great Britain.
In A Gathering Light, which has won this year's Carnegie Medal, Jennifer Donnelly tells the story of a young girl, Mattie Gokey, who has to choose between her family, struggling to help her widowed father make a backbreaking living farming in the foothills of the Adirondack mountains, and her own dreams of studying literature in New York.
Interwoven is the true story of a young, pregnant woman, Grace Brown, murdered in mysterious circumstances in 1906. The case achieved notoriety at the time. Grace's lover was arrested and tried for the murder on the strength of her letters recovered subsequently.
The story was re-told fictionally in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and made into a film twice, first in the 1930s, then again in 1951 as A Place in the Sun starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
The murder was local history for Donnelly, whose own grandmother had worked in a hotel on Big Moose Lake where the body was recovered. Her family reminisced about it. And it haunted Donnelly herself—'Grace wouldn't leave me alone.' She read Dreiser, and a factual account of the murder. But the letters themselves were what really clinched the matter: 'Her voice, her words. It tore me apart. I started grieving for her, even though she lived 100 years ago.'
What Donnelly could not stand was that Grace had been murdered at 19 for being pregnant, for not fitting in. Her letters were so vivid and evocative of their time that she decided she had to work out her own emotions 'by writing, telling the story in a new way, fictionalised, from my point of view'. In a piece for the Guardian, she describes her anger: 'During a summer that saw the headlines in America full of violence against girls and women, things didn't seem to have changed much.' The power of the story—and the power in the telling—is not an accident in Donnelly's family. Her father's ancestors were Irish immigrants who escaped the famine in 1848. They were very poor farmers, who settled in upstate New York to eke out a living, farming in what is still 'a brutal place'. Summers were short and, once over, 'it was a matter of life and death to get through the winter. You had to be smart, self-reliant, strong, to weather the remoteness and the loneliness'. The landscape—of 'staggering beauty'—has produced 'a strong silent people, independent, proud. And used to do doing what they want, non-conformists'.
The power of words
Storytelling was a tradition after meals. It was the only entertainment they could afford and, during the long winters, it helped to overcome the isolation. The whole family, she says, 'are born storytellers'. Her mother (in fact a German, orphaned during the war, who emigrated to the US) told her own stories too, and read to her. And the whole family read—there was a culture of reading when she grew up. 'I didn't think about it at the time, but I suppose that part time I was picking up the value of stories, the importance of early tradition.' And not only that. 'Hearing the older generation sit and talk, you absorb how to do pacing and suspense, and structure; how to hold your listeners rapt, how to deliver a good punch line.'
The ability to listen and hear the words talk was another thing, reflected in the dialogue, the word-games (and some dialect) of A Gathering Light. And in one of the book's central messages—the power of words to overcome adversity, to make people feel.
Donnelly has always been fascinated by language. She lived in London in the early 1980s and 'spent every spare moment' in the East End of London. 'I used to go to Brick Lane early on Sunday. Costermongers would sing their wares. Wide boys would hand jewelry back and forth and pull out wodges of cash. There were cockles and pickled whelks, and jellied eels. It was as close to the London of Hogarth and Dickens as I would ever get. The sellers made theatre out of words, out of their patter.' She thinks that Cockneys have a lot in common with northern New Yorkers: 'One is an urban culture, one rural, but they were both cultures of the poor. If they like you, they tease you. It is wrong to be openly affectionate. Maybe it isn't good to be too open. To survive, to be successful, you had to be tough.'
A Gathering Light has become a successful 'cross-over' novel, particularly since being chosen by the Richard & Judy show as one of their 'Summer Reads'. But it was originally written with young girls, not adults, in mind. Donnelly wanted to show them that they have choices in life, but that choosing is never easy. She wanted to reach them before they made choices that set the course for their lives. 'Mattie adores her sisters and loves her father. She sees the attraction of family. Royal [who becomes her beau, and wants to marry her] is a good-looking, capable guy. He has a passion for farming and the land. People like him are valued still.'
Much of the novel is about the tug of war in Mattie's heart between her feelings of loyalty to family and place, and her longing to study and to read and be a writer (which her family cannot understand). She wants to go to college, to be like the literature teacher at school, who encourages and inspires her. (The teacher, Miss Wilcox, is based on Emily Dickinson and one of Donnelly's high-school English teachers.) Mattie is encouraged, too, by her black school-friend Weaver, himself determined to overcome poverty and racial discrimination by getting a good education and becoming a lawyer.
It is Mattie's work in a local hotel (To earn money to be able to pay to go to college? Or support her father and the family? Or save to get married?) that brings her into contact with Grace Brown and her letters, and a story that she cannot ignore.
As Mattie learns more, she gradually finds the courage and strength to make her own choices. But there is no wish—or attempt—by Donnelly to preach. 'I didn't want to say that Mattie's choice is the best or only choice.' Mattie is pulled in two directions, as was Donnelly herself, until recently too much influenced by earlier feminist voices to find time in her life for as many children as she now wishes she could have—a source of regret.
Universal issues
The power of A Gathering Light comes from its dilemmas, which are universal: the desperate wish to break free from the hard labour and grinding poverty of their life on the land; the conflict between loyalty to family and what one knows, and the attractions of dreams and aspirations. It is why the book appeals to adults too, though one could add that Donnelly's sensitivity to social injustice gives urgency to the narrative, without ever leading to stereotyping, or making her didactic. After all of this, it comes perhaps as a surprise that Donnelly herself 'had a fortunate childhood, parents who pushed me hard to do my best.' Never any real deprivation, then. Even when she fell in with a much wealthier bunch of friends, her father merely advised her, if she wanted what they had, to 'Work. Get an education. Make something of yourself.'
And that she did, getting up at 4:30 in the morning or 5, to write for a couple of hours before going out to earn a wage. Her writing was 'years and years in the making' before she found a publisher, or achieved recognition. She went through years of depression and despair to get there, even though she had been telling stories since childhood and 'inflicting them' on her family. Even after 10 years when she had finished The Tea Rose, her first novel, it took a while to find a publisher. But her agent is 'as stubborn and persistent as I am'.
Sense of privilege
Perhaps some of the drive comes from a sense of privilege at what she has—and her great-grandparents had not. Her great-grandfather would have loved an opportunity of education. 'He was taken out of school at 12 to drive mules and make money for the family. He died young and was bed-ridden before he passed away. All he wanted to do before he died was read. His children had to keep bringing him books. What would his life have been if he had had a few of the opportunities I had?' When she was researching for the book, she once asked her grandmother (an inspiration for the character of Mattie) if she had minded not having had time to read or study. To which she retorted that there was not time—there was so much work to be done, just to put food on the table. 'To live you had to grow your own food. Your survival depended on your ability to farm.'
Colin Brabazon, Chair of the Carnegie judges, praised 'the striking luminosity' of A Gathering Light's prose, 'its tangible sense of place and the integrity of its vision'. Perhaps it was inspired, too, by some of the imagery of Donnelly's Irish Catholic upbringing. She thinks that the obligatory attendance at church ('it was an accepted part of your life') gave her a good basis for storytelling. 'I sat and listened to the Gospel. I wanted Judas to have a change of heart. It was amazing stuff—about loyalty, and betrayal, and faith. The stories gave you a lot of things to think about at 7 or 8 years old, sitting in church, bored out of your skull!' The sense of wonder, of the miraculous, a heightened feeling of excitement and expectation, has stayed with her, though she does not describe herself as religious.
Donnelly is pleased—and surprised—about the interest the novel has aroused across the generations (and the gender divide thanks to Weaver). She thinks that 'literature' is very much adult-oriented. 'Teenagers tend to look to adult characters and situations, but it means a tremendous amount to them if adults repay the favour, by occasionally venturing back.' She thinks this sends a very powerful message—'that we value their stories and their concerns. It means the world to a kid to have someone take an interest in what he or she is interested in.'
Nonetheless, it is probably the sense of conviction conveyed by the writing, the universal dilemmas and the power of the story-telling in this book that appeal to adults as well as young people. It is ironic and apt that it was oral tradition that attracted Donnelly to prose, and the power of shared stories that is driving readers back to narrative fiction—perhaps one of the most striking features about the current 'crossover' phenomenon.
Though the characters in the novel came to her 'out of the mist', it is real voices that inspire Donnelly. She loves the historical research. 'I went to the library of the Adirondack Museum. I'd sit down and tell the librarian what I was after, and he would go back and forth, bringing collections of this and that—diaries, menus from the great camps, old newspapers, a lock of Grace Brown's hair—a writer's treasure trove.' This took her on paths she never knew existed. 'He'd say: "Do you know about this?" or "Try that." I am sure many, many authors owe huge debts to librarians and archivists for their work. I know I do!'.
Source: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, "Haunted by Grace," in Update, September 2004, p. 1.