In the short stories, “No One’s a Mystery,” by Elizabeth Tallent, and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” by Joyce Carol Oates, there are strong misperceptions between illusion and reality. In Oates’ story, Connie, a young adolescent girl, is challenged with finding out who she really is when society is telling her to be two different people and in Tallent’s story, a man named Jack and his young mistress have two different ideas on what might be written in a five year diary he gave her.
In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Connie is a young teenage girl who isn’t quite certain where she should fit in; a stage all teenagers go through. Trying to find her identity and raise confidence in herself, she tests the limitations of her family and boys to see how well she can keep things under her control. The illusion is that Connie is a confident, in-control, flirty and a little bit sassy girl who relishes her perfect life. But in the end, reality, the fact that she’s not so sure of herself, and things aren’t always under her control catches up with her forces her into seeing the truth. She has one persona at home, where she’s being overlooked by authoritive figures, and another elsewhere. This lack of identity makes her vulnerable to an evil character, Arnold Friend, who exploits her with his knowledge of how to feed a vain, unsteady ego for his own interests and desires. In many of Oates’ works she uses characters with two sides, (such as Connie) to demonstrate human nature and its tendency toward having a ‘bad’ side. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Arnold, perhaps a devil like messenger of some sort, is used to force Connie into leading a whole, real life. Arnold is the ‘bad’ side of Connie, appearing on her front door step to tell her she needs to choose between the good, humble, at-home-with-the-family Connie, and the forbidden Connie who goes into dark alleys with boys for hours when she’s telling her parents she’s shopping. Unfortunately, he does not give her a choice because he wants to capture every last bit of her innocence. Connie does not understand what’s happening at first, thinking that he’s just another boy coming to flirt with her while her parents are away, but in fact Arnold knows everything about her and her family and after a while of some conversation she starts to realize that he seems much older than her, it appears that he’s wearing ‘stuffed boots,’ to make him taller and that he’s actually very intelligent despite the way his only words are lyrics from songs. Arnold is ‘fake’ because he is Connie’s ‘evil side,’ coming to take over what little innocence there is left. This is obvious by the way he knows every detail of when her parents are coming home and many other personal details, and because of the way he speaks without emotion, using song lyrics as words, he cannot fight for his own existence. He seems real. But in fact is part of Connie. By making the mistake of thinking Arnold is just like all the other boys, Connie gets drawn into reality while thinking she’s still in her safe little bubble of confident make believe, but really, she’s just losing control over her bad side.
In “No One is a Mystery,” the narrators illusion is that she and an older man, Jack, have a future together and that he really cares for her despite the fact that he’s already married. She hopes that one day they’ll get married and have kids and it’ll all be written in detail in a five year diary right down to her breastfeeding their daughter. However, the reality is all up to Jack, the elder, more stubborn and persuasive figure who mocks and twists her theory. He tries to convince her that in the diary she will start out with, “I love jack sooo much!!!,” but that by the end of it’s five years, it’ll read, “I just read the beginning of you, old friend, and I came across this ‘Jack.’ I don’t really remember him, but I think he was just some guy with nothing to do riding around in his truck. Oh well, at least he taught me something about sex.” He tries to engrain in her that he’s only a fling and that she will soon barely remember him. Jacks reluctance toward a relationship is expressed through his dirty truck with sharp objects which the narrator comments, “Is unsafe for children’s feet,” and his affair with the narrator showing how unfaithful he is toward his wife. This is the reality because Jack’s the leading character and he puts this into plain perspective with the last line of the story, “And her breath would smell like your milk, and it’s kind of a bittersweet smell, if you want to know the truth.” (In reference to the narrators description of their daughters breath smelling like vanilla.) He makes it evident that his story is the reality because he labels it as the ‘truth,’ and, because his dialogue is last in the story, it’s very stubborn and decisive.
In Tallent’s and Oate’s stories, there were very distinct gaps between illusion and reality. In Oates’ story, Connie had not decided who her true self was and dawdled in dream-land until an un-welcomed stranger who was really part of herself came a long to force her into a real decision. In Tallent’s story, Jack and his young mistress had two opposing viewpoints over their future when there was really only one option because Jack had been paramount from the start, giving him power to make the decisions. Both stories ultimately ended in the characters facing reality as determined by the dominant character.
Flannery O’Connor, a famous Southern author from the 1900’s, conjured the theme for the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by using her devoted Christian Orthodox faith as a plot building block and an emotional appeal.
Flannery O’Connor was a rather famous southern gothic style writer from Georgia in the mid 1900’s. In one of her most famous stories, “A Good Man is hard to Find,” a grandmother and her family go on vacation to Florida with full knowledge that a serial killer dubbed the ‘Misfit’ is on the loose in the southern area. On the way through Georgia, the grandmother recalls visiting a plantation in the area when she was a little girl. Bailey, her son, does not want to stop; but the grandmother tells the children about a non-existent secret panel in the house, and they plea with the father to let them pass by until he eventually gives in. They venture off down a dirt road when all of a sudden the grandmother remembers a horrid thought and her cat, Pitty Sing, (who wasn’t supposed to come in the first place but was hidden in a basket by the grandmother) jumps up only to scare the driver into running the car off the road and into a ditch. Generally, everyone walked away unharmed, but the car wouldn’t start up. Eventually a car came along with three people inside who offered their help. The grandmother identified one of them as the Misfit which led to the other two men killing her family while she talked to the Misfit, even though he ended up killing her too.
In this short story, along with many others, O’Connor illuminates a time of great desire or dread in a simple characters life. The grandmother’s desire to see the old plantation she knew as a young girl led to the deaths of her family and herself because she tempted fate. They were not supposed to go out of the way of their destination, but the grandmother made it so that she would get her way instead of going with what God had planned out for her family and her. O’Connor uses God as this ‘planner’ or ‘marker’ in her writing so that when her characters come to a point of great desire or dread, they fight for their own existences and tempt the way of God. O’Connor, being a strict Orthodox Christian, uses this conflict to build a plot.
In the story, “A Good Man is hard to Find,” fate is un escapable. The grandmother lives her life through stories that she conjures up in her head. Because of this, she has an extremely distorted sense of reality and feels she can twist what is real by using words as a sly strategy to trick people into also believing what she sees as true. She becomes so good at this that she convinces HERSELF that her made up stories are the real thing. When she tells Bailey to turn down the dirt road so that they could visit her childhood plantation…she forgets that they’re in Georgia and not Tennessee where the real plantation is. This is where the role of God and O’Connor’s faith comes in. God, being a divine, almighty, powerful being, does not like a silly old grandmother to lie and mess with his reality. He has realized that she’s been swaying the truth and feels she must be punished for her actions, so he tricks her at her own game. The grandmother convinced herself that they were going to Tennessee because that’s what she wanted (in the beginning she argued with the family that Tennessee would be a much better vacation spot than Florida) so she tried to twist reality, but instead twister her own thoughts, forgetting that they were in a different state and that she had not yet convinced them to go to the state of her choice instead of Florida. That lie ultimately led to their deaths. This fact that she relies solely on her wit and fanciful talking skills to lie herself a new life becomes excruciatingly evident when her lie of a life had become one with her own.
When the car full of strangers stops to help them, the grandmother blatantly points out the misfit and names him. In doing this, O’Connor incorporated Gods punishment of defying his commandments into making the grandmothers ‘fixed’ reality into the REAL reality. In other words, the grandmother made this man, who might’ve just helped them if she hadn’t opened her mouth, become the misfit. She named him, so he conformed. In a way, the Misfit is a messenger from God, perhaps in the form of a demon, sent to teach the grandmother a lesson.
The arrival of the Misfit (God) is the beginning of a twisted lesson in which the grandmother and her family are all shot to teach her that one cannot twist reality or change fate, because no matter what, there is an inevitable ending whether he or she likes it or not. When the grandmother finally realizes that the only reason he is ‘the Misfit,’ or perhaps that he is in existence at all, is because she had created him, she says, “You’re one of my own children.” For the first time in the story she is speechless and finally understands that her cunning speeches cannot get her out of this scenario. She finally realizes that the hole she finds herself entrapped in was dug by those ‘cunning speeches.’
In conclusion, O’Connor had draped a very dramatic effect over “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” because of the power behind the themes of Religion and God.
Filed under: English and Literature | Tags: English and Literature, feminism
The Masculine Chrysanthemums
Claustrophobic. Trapped. Enclosed. These were all feelings felt by Elisha Allen in the story, “The Chrysanthemums,” by John Steinbeck. A story set back in the early eighteenth century in rural Salinas, California, a married rancher woman is tending to her prized chrysanthemums when she has an emotional encounter with a stranger. Although at first glace it may seem insignificant, and event that could happen often, the episode ultimately suggests the woman to make a life altering decision. The woman, Elisa, is unconsciously a feminist, and throughout the short story, she discovers her internal need for freedom and equality.
“The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salina Valley from the sky and the rest of the world,” the very first sentence of the story depicts what Elisa is feeling. According to Cynthia Bily, an English teacher at Adrian College in Michigan, this symbolizes the relatively small, cramped life Elisa leads. This is so because Elisa is living in the early 1900’s and she has little freedom. Although she knew the roads and how to get to places when the stranger asked for directions, she only knew this because her husband would take her out often and she grew accustomed to seeing the different areas. This is still an instance of entrapment because she could only go to the movies or out to dinner with her husband once in awhile. She never drove herself to places she wanted to go. Trapped.
Other instances of her small life are characterized by cleanliness, the fog, the wire and fencing and the geraniums. As a woman back in the day, she didn’t have very much to do so she cleaned and gardened a lot. The story describes her house as always polished and swept clean (Hughes.) Her chrysanthemums were prized multiple years for she had the time to tend to them and make them grow big. One can tell that Steinbeck wanted the reader to understand Elisa’s feeling of entrapment by the way he used the fog hanging over Salinas Valley as a ‘lid’ on a ‘small pot,’ and by making everything closed in and small. Her garden was surrounded by wire fencing. Her house was ‘enclosed’ in geraniums creeping up the windows. In many interpretations windows are a symbol of freedom and a way to start over. In this story the geraniums block the window. All of these descriptions inhibit a sense of claustrophobia in the reader because it’s like they all represent a large rut into which Elisa is stuck in. Elisa needed a rope named Freedom.
In Elisa’s time period a woman with a house, a beautiful garden and a loving husband is supposed to be happy. Society is telling her she’s happy, so she confines herself to that stereotype; until the stranger stops by. One day a traveling man with a scraggly dog pulls his miss-matched team into her driveway supposedly needing directions (but he’s really just trying to find a new customer to give him things to fix for profit.) His hair is graying yet he does not look old. This information tells the reader that Elisa’s age is not an obstacle to what she needs to accomplish (feminism.) Her dogs nearly get into a fight with his, and he says, “That’s a bad dog in a fight when he gets started,” and she laughs and asks how long it usually takes for him to get started to which he replies, “Sometimes not for weeks and weeks.” This could show how sometimes it takes something a while to recognize what’s plainly right before it. This could show that sometimes it takes a person a long time to realize what they’re supposed to do. It takes a little over 30 years, plus marriage, but Elisa is finally starting to understand that her internal need for freedom and equality is a feministic feeling. The man is the catalyst for this change that needs to happen for Elisa to have a peaceful mentality.
In the story the man tries to make a sale and ask if she needs anything fixed and she blatantly says no. However, when he discovers she has a love for flowers, he uses that valuable information a long with some sly psychology to get her to find something for him. He announces himself to her as a devoted flower lover describing her chrysanthemums as, “a long-stemmed flower that looks like a quick puff of smoke.” She’s immediately interested in the man because of his knack at finding beautiful things. Unlike her husband, Henry, who enjoys practical things, he loves beautiful things. He and Elisa both look for things that have a beautiful aura even if they’re not very practical. Henry is the opposite. In the beginning, he compliments Elisa’s chrysanthemums by referring to their large size and wishes that she could work her planter’s magic on his apple fields. Henry likes profitable, efficient, probably things. Being married to him for such a long time, Elisa is delighted to have found someone that shares her perspective.
After they discover their shared viewpoint, the man explains that a woman down the street has been wanting some chrysanthemum seeds and asks her for some. She’s overjoyed and gives him a flowerpot with some sand and shoots in it. She describes how to take care of them with great detail and grows aroused while doing so. She was so interested in this man, whom also loved flowers and was so much like her that her ‘voice grew husky,’ and she almost touched his leg, but withdrew at the last second (Palmerino.) She ends up finding pots for him to mend, and when while he’s working she grows brave and tells him of how he may have competition for she likes his life and how it’s full of adventure and traveling. However, before leaving, he disregards her idea and explains it’s “too scary and dangerous for a woman.” Further illuminating how oppressed Elisa’s life was, despite her efforts to ‘break out.’
That night her husband promised to take her out, happy because he had sealed a large deal with some wealthy customers. She scrubs herself cleaner than she had ever done before, wore her prettiest dress, and tried to get out in Henry some of what the mans personality held. When he finally sees her she’s shocked by his response of, “You look as if you could break a calf over your knee and happily eat it like a watermelon.” She was going for beautiful and bold, but of course, got her husbands pragmatic answer. She wished to be feminine while still having the grandeur of being a male (which of course was strictly against society in her time.) She then realizes that the man who said he loved beautiful things was really just like her husband, practical. She then understands that the stereotype will not change and that the man was only trying for a sale. Slightly broken hearted, she gets into the car with her husband. On the way, she once again tries to break her confines by asking for wine with dinner, to which her husbands agrees would be suitable. She then asks about the fights. He says if she really wants to go they can, but she takes her request back telling him wine is enough after describing the gruesome articles she had read about how bloody the fights are. In this area of the story, Elisa has been broken down after realizing her strong encounter with the man was fake but still tries to be more feministic. Unfortunately, it does not last long. On the way home she sees a black spot in the road in the distance and automatically knows that they’re the seeds; just the seeds. She knows he took the flowerpot with him.
In the short story, “The Chrysanthemums,” Elisa learns a little bit about feminism and how hard it is to be a feminist and fight for freedom and equality during her time period.
Works Cited
1. Akers, Tim, ed. “The Chrysanthemums.” Short Stories for Students. Farmington Hills: The Gale Group, 1999. 59-67.
2. Bily, Cynthia. “The Chrysanthemums.” Short Stories for Students. Ed. Time Akers. Farmington Hills: The Gale Group, 1999. 67-71.
3. Hughes, R.S. John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction, Boston: Twayne, 1989 p. 26.
4. Palmerino, Gregory J. “The Chrysanthemums.” The Explicator 62 (2004):164. eLibrary. ProQuest. New Smyrna Beach High School Library, New Smyrna Beach. 12 Apr. 2006. <http://elibrary.bigchalk.com/libweb/elib/do/search>
