A Woman Alone in a Room Realizing Something by Alice Mattison
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A Woman Alone in a Room Realizing Something by Alice Mattison (from The Writer’s Chronicle, September 2019)
A story submitted to a workshop I taught recently was unusually well-written. The writer was fairly new to writing fiction, but she had created a complex and interesting character with a compelling problem, which she described in lively sentences. But the whole story took place in the woman’s unmoving car, where she sat alone, thinking. She remembered what had already happened, and imagined what might happen next. Between the reader and the events in the character’s life was a muffling layer of thought.
The more experienced students and I were quick to explain that in a story, something must happen. Stories exist in time, and events turn a still photograph into a movie. Something happens to start things off, something makes things even worse—and then an event arising out of what came before makes us feel that we’ve arrived somewhere. A problem is solved or, maybe, not solved, but there’s enough of a resolution that we don’t look around to see if the writer or publisher left out the last page by mistake.
The writer of the story was grateful to hear all this, eager to learn. And yet she looked sad, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that look. As if we’d told her that the most beautiful, most alluring path up the mountain was closed to hikers. Sorry—the trail is over that way.
Or maybe the student was not sad. Maybe I was sad. Thinking about the look on her face, I remembered my own early stories. I had wished to write stories for years before I dared to try. Stories I read—about crime, war, passionate love, dangerous risk-taking—included action that was far more exciting than anything I had experienced. I began writing fiction after I came across stories by Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, in which ordinary people lived through difficult friendships and love relationships, brought up children, wished they had more money, objected to what the government was doing. At the end of the story, they understood something better than before. I could relate to that.
I noticed the characters’ new understanding but didn’t notice that events had brought it about, even if the events were less spectacular than those in more conventional stories; I didn’t see the unmomentous series of happenings causing other happenings and arousing curiosity in the reader. So I began writing stories in which nothing happened at all. Each one might have been titled, “A Woman Alone in a Room Realizes Something.” At least in my student’s story, the woman was in a car. She might have put the key in the ignition and driven somewhere. Seen something. Run over something. My characters were stuck unless a tornado blew their houses away.
In Richard Wright’s (1908–1960) memoir, Black Boy, published in 1945, he describes writing his first short story as a child in Mississippi. He did it as a relief from praying: his Seventh Day Adventist grandmother was trying to save his soul, and sent him to his room for long prayer sessions. His friends dealt with the problem by being baptized whether they believed or not, but Wright couldn’t lie about what he thought. So he kept trying to pray, hoping for some kind of conversion, which never came. He writes,
One day while killing my hour of prayer, I remembered a series of volumes of Indian history I had read the year before. Yes, I knew what I would do; I would write a story about the Indians… But what about them? Well, an Indian girl… I wrote of an Indian maiden, beautiful and reserved, who sat alone upon the bank of a still stream, surrounded by eternal twilight and ancient trees, waiting... The girl was keeping some vow which I could not describe and, not knowing how to develop the story, I resolved that the girl had to die. She rose slowly and walked toward the dark stream, her face stately and cold; she entered the water and walked on until the water reached her shoulders, her chin; then it covered her. Not a murmur or a gasp came from her, even in dying.
‘And at last the darkness of the night descended and softly kissed the surface of the watery grave and the only sound was the lonely rustle of the ancient trees,’ I wrote as I penned the final line.1
He continues, “I was excited; I read it over and saw that there was a yawning void in it. There was no plot, no action, nothing save atmosphere and longing and death. But I had never in my life done anything like it; I had made something, no matter how bad it was; and it was mine.” 2
Wright somehow knew that what he had just done was important and good, and also that it was flawed. Why hadn’t he included events? At this point in the memoir, Wright has told us that as a little boy he accidentally set his house on fire, that his father deserted the family, that his mother got sick and he was temporarily sent to live with relatives. He has recounted numerous incidents of hunger and brutal punishment. He has narrated fights in the street and holding off bullies. When he first took it into his head to write, he had experienced plenty of action, but he wrote about a woman who thinks.
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was also was drawn to the topic of a woman alone thinking when she was new to fiction writing. An early story, “The Tiredness of Rosabel” begins with activity: Rosabel, who sells hats in a London shop, buys violets, eats a skimpy meal, and takes a smelly bus home. Once in her room, though, she thinks. She thinks about a woman who bought a hat that day, then went out, leaving the man she was with to pay. He asked Rosabel,
“Ever been painted?” with a “slight tinge of insolence.” 3 When she said no, he complimented her figure. Rosabel was attracted and repelled at once, and now, in her room, she imagines that it’s she rather than the man’s actual girlfriend who goes off with him. He buys her violets, takes her to fancy places, marries her. At the end of the story she sleeps. Rosabel is a woman alone in her room thinking, but she doesn’t have a life-altering realization. The last sentence, about waking up the next morning, is “And because her heritage was that tragic optimism, which is all too often the only inheritance of youth, still half asleep, she smiled, with a little nervous tremor round her mouth.” 4 The reader, not the character, comes to understand something.
Apparently, new writers may be drawn to writing stories without event, stories about the inner life, about a woman—sometimes it’s a man—alone in a room, or in a car, or at the edge of a
river, realizing something. Why do some of us want to avoid events when we write? Why do we want to write about the inner life instead? I used to think it was because we were afraid. That was certainly true of me. When my students have ideas for dramatic events, they are often afraid to use them: maybe any drama will be melodrama. It’s a fear of cheapness, of securing the reader’s attention illegitimately. If characters stay in one place and just think, the writer at least hangs onto her dignity. She doesn’t risk sounding ignorant by claiming her characters drove unlikely cars, drank unlikely drinks, and shot unlikely weapons, nor does she sound like a headline in
the National Enquirer.
It’s also less painful to write about thinking than about action. Upsetting events in stories upset the writer as well as the reader. If we’ve lived through them, why live through them again? If we haven’t, why make up events that evoke bad emotions we have felt for other reasons?
Writing about thinking of bad events puts the events at a comfortable distance. But unfortunately, distant emotion often makes for boring writing. Self-protective writing can’t draw in a reader. We have to be brave. I slowly learned to take risks in my own work, and to learn enough to write about what I had not personally experienced. Now I urge students to write what’s emotionally difficult and what they fear will be melodramatic. If it does seem overdone, they can rewrite it, using fewer adverbs and adjectives and taking out figures of speech and clichés. Understatement is the solution, not leaving out the drama.
my writing better.
I didn’t see the unmomentous series of happenings causing other happenings and arousing curiosity in the reader. So I began writing stories in which nothing happened at all.
Fear, however, isn’t the only reason new writers want to write about the inner life, and the other reasons that come to mind seem more worthy of exploration, of asking the question: Are there good and compelling works of literature in which the chief events are in the characters’ minds? If so, what provides forward momentum? Why do we keep reading?
I suspect that fear wasn’t the reason the student in our workshop looked sad when we proposed taking that character out of her car (or giving her a passenger) and making things
happen. I suspect that like many of us, she was in love with the mind. She wanted to write about thinking. Maybe the discovery that makes us want to write in the first place is the discovery that we have an inner life, a psychological life: we are creatures who perceive, feel, want, reconsider. And the first impulse to write is an impulse to record that—to record the miracle that something is happening when nothing is happening.
Many of us were first drawn to literature not for its capacity to describe action but for its capacity to let us know how people felt. We fell in love with books when we recognized characters’ feelings. If as children we had emotions or desires our families considered inappropriate, baffling, or sinful, we may have had our lives changed by discovering that characters in books had feelings similar to ours.
And yet, the fact that mental life, emotional life, is magnificent isn’t a reason to write about it. Minds are wonderful things because—like stories—they reflect and make sense of the tangible world. Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) wrote, “The Mind, that Ocean where each kind / Does streight its own resemblance find.” 5 It may be useful for a writer to think of stories, poems, and memoir as comparable to minds: like a mind, a piece of writing is a container that carries within it a representation of the world. The wonders of mental life are in the story already: the writer imagined, feared, or hoped, then recounted events that make the reader, in turn, imagine, fear, or hope. The mind provides not subject matter but a way of experiencing it, as a mixing bowl makes cookies possible without being contained in them. We describe a person who is afraid, for example, by mentioning what causes the fear. The story says, “The lion stepped out of its cage,” and we know that the watching child is afraid—which makes us afraid, too. The word “afraid” is redundant—unless this child is not afraid of a lion. “The lion stepped out of its cage and Jennifer watched hopefully to see if it ate the lion tamer.” If feelings are unexpected, we do need to hear about them. But in general, loving the inner life would not seem to be sufficient reason to make it one’s subject.
There is another reason, however, to write stories in which the action is only in the characters’ minds, and it might be the most convincing one. If stories are always about action, then only people who do things can be in stories. And if action is defined as what happens when people with power do something, then fictional characters must be powerful people. In stories about kings, generals, and great lovers, people destroy things and accomplish things; when they come to bad ends, they have a long way to fall and make a big crash. Literature was mostly about powerful men for a long time: Oedipus, Achilles, Othello, Hamlet, Lear, the kings and princes in Grimm’s fairy tales. If domestic life isn’t considered interesting enough to be in a story, and women are excluded from everything except the home, then women and children in stories, with a few exceptions like Antigone, will be sexual objects or symbols of frailty and sweetness, or possibly of rot and evil—symbols, not people. If men in stories must take action, men who have no power will appear in stories primarily to commit crimes. If stories require sex then asexual people can’t be in stories, and virgins will turn up in fiction only to lose their virginity. If stories require power then people deprived of power—because they are women, or nonwhite, or poor, or disabled, or for some other reason—can’t be in stories.
Literature in the last few hundred years has found ways to describe people without power, of course. They may be people who exert control—or try to—within their own town, workplace, or family. One way to write about people who aren’t kings is to write about microcosms: offices or factories in which the boss’s power is as frightening as a king’s, schools with a scary principal, families with a tyrannical father. We also need stories about work and power in which the powerful people are women, people of color, and others from groups that have had little power over the centuries, and we see more of these lately.
But as long as powerlessness exists, we will also need stories about powerless characters, about people who don’t have important accomplishments, and possibly also about people who do nothing. We know that all human feeling is experienced in kitchens, so we need stories set in kitchens. People who have no power at all, even in kitchens, still have minds, and minds that may
be just as active as the minds of the people in charge. Maybe literature needs stories of what happens in the mind in order to give powerless people a place in literature.
Let us turn to some examples: first, books that explore and celebrate the inner life without sacrificing event. The inner life can be important in a story that includes dramatic, newsworthy action, and also in one in which the action is domestic and private, yet meaningful.
Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy—the book in which he describes writing his first story about a woman alone thinking—is full of event and action, some of it historically instructive, some focused narrowly on the life of one boy and young man in one family: a black boy born in Mississippi in 1908. But from the first incident in the book, in which Wright, at the age of four, has the interesting idea of setting broom straws on fire, then the further wish to find out, as he puts it, “how the long fluffy white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of straws and held it under them,”6 Black Boy is about the imagination: not just what happens, but what it’s like to think about what happens. The first chapters describe poverty and racism in the south in the early twentieth century. Later Wright moves to the north, where he finds a different sort of racism, and the difficulty of trying to write freely while belonging to the Communist party. But the book’s message, whatever is happening, is always that Wright needed to be—and by implication that everyone needs to be—what he calls “human”: he needed freedom of thought and feeling. His keen perceptions suffuse the book, and he often describes sensory experience at moments when nothing much is happening except one person noticing the world: “Each experience had a sharp meaning of its own,” he writes, then gives us a page and a half of examples like these:
There was the fear and awe I felt when Grandpa took me to a sawmill to watch the giant whirring steel blades whine and scream as they bit into wet green logs. There was the puckery taste that almost made me cry when I ate my first half-ripe persimmon.
There was the greedy joy in the tangy taste of wild hickory nuts. There was the dry hot
summer morning when I scratched my bare arms on briers while picking blackberries and came home with my fingers and lips stained black with sweet berry juice.7
It’s no wonder that when this boy decided to write a story, he wrote about someone’s thoughts and feelings.
As a teenager, Wright finds it almost impossible to adjust his tone and words to adults’ expectations, mostly white adults, but first adults in his family, who either share white notions about how teenagers should speak, or try to prepare him to live among whites. His uncle asks him what time it is, and whether the boy’s watch is correct, and is enraged when Wright says conversationally, “If it’s a little slow or fast, it’s not far wrong.” 8 When Wright begins working he can’t keep a job, and a friend advises him that he needs to learn to live among white people, who not only expect black people to act subservient, but to pretend they prefer it. Wright says,
I had begun coping with the white world too late. I could not make subservience an automatic part of my behavior. I had to feel and think out each tiny item of racial experience in the light of the whole race problem, and to each item I brought the whole of
my life… I could not help it. I would not grin.9
As a young man he moves to Memphis. When he finally sees a way to move from there to Chicago, the superficially friendly boss at the job he is quitting insists that Wright agree that it would be better to stay, and that he is happier in the south than he will be in the north, that he has no wish for racial equality. He’s forced to lie, to say that his mother is going and he wants to be near her. The boss insists that when Wright goes north he will change. “I wanted to tell him that I was going north precisely to change, but I did not,” Wright tells us. “‘I’ll be the same,’ I said,
trying to indicate that I had no imagination whatever.” 10
The racism Black Boy describes matters for many reasons, but an important one is that it violates Wright’s right to think and feel freely. His descriptions of events are always subjective: they are descriptions of what happened to someone with a particular personality, a particular sort
of mind. Wright has put behind him the limitations of his first childish story, but he continues to write about thought and feeling.
A story that celebrates powerless people, and that exists almost entirely within the mind of a woman alone—yet one that still moves toward its conclusion by means of events in the tangible world—is Tillie Olsen’s (1912–2007) “I Stand Here Ironing.” A mother of four who has experienced poverty and is teased by her oldest daughter for constantly ironing, irons her children’s clothes while imagining a conversation she will or won’t have with someone— apparently a teacher or guidance counselor—who has requested a conference about that daughter, Emily. It becomes clear that Emily, whom her mother admits to neglecting to care for the younger children, has had her troubles, but also that she is doing well in some respects. She performs as a comedian.
Then Emily herself “runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful step, and I know she is happy tonight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call did not happen today.” 11 We begin to think that Emily is fine, really, that her mother will talk to the important person at school, and that Emily may receive some useful benefit or help. But then Emily says
that she needn’t take her midterms the next day because everyone will soon die in nuclear war. The mother decides not to talk to the potentially helpful (or unhelpful) outsider. The story ends,
Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to
know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.12
The mother’s wish for her daughter is sadly modest: just keep her from being utterly destroyed. The events here are not exciting: the announcement that a conversation may occur, the arrival of the subject of that conversation, and the decision not to speak. But they are events, and the reader becomes curious, maybe hopeful, possibly coming to feel at the end that the mother’s lack of ambition for her daughter is inevitable. She acts by making a decision not to act, and Emily’s life may be different for it.
It’s possible to write stories like Richard Wright’s memoir, in which the inner life is so important that even momentous events don’t obscure it. And it’s possible to write stories in which the events are so ordinary and low-key that we might not notice they are there, like “I Stand Here Ironing,” in which the movement of a mind making sense of a life appears at first glance to be the whole story. Can writers dispense with events altogether? Are there other ways to give literature the forward momentum that keeps us reading?
Personification—breaking the bounds of realism—offers one way to introduce action into an account of someone alone, thinking. Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Garden” is about solitude. The speaker walks into a garden by himself, and there he thinks. But instead of writing that the man enjoys the garden, Marvell turns the garden into a place where objects have wills of their own and athletic powers, as in an animated cartoon. Apples drop around him, grapes “crush” themselves on his mouth; a nectarine and a peach “reach” into his hand, the flowers “ensnare” him, and he “falls” on the grass—whereupon his mind creates new worlds, “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green Thought in a green Shade.” 13 His soul, meanwhile, flies into a tree and sings. Marvell transforms the passivity of looking around and thinking into an assault on the observer by what he looks at, and an active response by his inner life while his body lies still: nothing happens, but in another sense there is plenty of action.
Literature in the last few hundred years has found ways to describe people without power, of course. They may be people who exert control—or try to—within their own town, workplace, or family. One way to write about people who aren’t kings is to write about microcosms.
Can realistic narrative do it? One story that includes little but the life of the mind is “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). A narrator who seems to be Woolf herself remembers sitting after tea, smoking, and daydreaming. She is glad to be distracted from unpleasant thoughts when she notices a mark on the wall. For nine pages—as months pass, apparently—she occasionally wonders what the mark could be (It’s not in the right place for a
nail hole, she says at one point. “In certain lights,” she says, it “seems actually to project from the wall”)14—but mostly letting her mind move freely to other subjects.
She doesn’t stand up to see what it is. She rejects action. She even considers rejecting the action of looking at the mark, but decides against that:
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a
full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.15
The reader is curious about what the mark is, and also about the nature of the troubling thoughts that the narrator rejects throughout the story. But these are the only sources of forward momentum. At the end, the narrator seems to have fallen asleep:
Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying:
“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.” “Yes?’’
“Though it’s no good buying newspapers.…Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!… All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.” The story ends, “Ah, the mark on the wall. It was a snail.” 16
The story appeared in 1921. It’s not about a mark on the wall or about the mind, it’s about the first world war. This story doesn’t have much in the way of events—someone notices a mark, someone else explains it. But at the end—when the story becomes, at least to this reader, great—it isn’t about a woman alone in a room thinking. A new character lets us know what the narrator’s suppressed thoughts would be about.
Another long story written at the time of the first world war is “The Walk” by Robert Walser (1878-1956), a Swiss writer. The narrator is not in a room, but he is solitary, and he has a new understanding at the end. He takes a walk, stopping for lunch with a friend; at a tailor’s for a
fitting of a suit he dislikes; at a bookstore, where he requests a book that is both popular and good, then scornfully refuses the one the bookseller offers. Mostly the story records unconvincing pleasantness. Only on the last page does the narrator speak frankly. He is picking flowers in the rain, and writes:
“Why am I picking flowers here?” I asked myself, and looked down pensively to the ground, and the delicate rain increased my pensiveness until it became sorrow. Old, long-past failures occurred to me, disloyalty, hatred, scorn, falsity, cunning, anger, and many violent unbeautiful actions. Uncontrolled passion, wild desire, and how I had hurt people sometimes, and done wrong.17
It’s an impressive story of superficial ease and torment underneath, like “The Mark on the Wall,” and written, like it, during a war that must have seemed to deny the value and meaning of thinking.
It’s impossible to talk about stories in which action occurs in the mind without mentioning Henry James’s (1843–1916) long short story (almost a novella) “The Beast in the Jungle,” written in 1903. John Marcher—his last name is ironic—meets a woman at a house party named May Bartram, whom he vaguely remembers. She reminds him that he told her something he has thought he kept secret:
You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.18
He is amazed that he told her, but excited. She offers to “watch” with him.
They become friends. They speak of John Marcher’s fate as a beast in the jungle that may spring at any time. Years pass. He has a “little office under government.” 19 She has inherited just enough money to support herself modestly. Decades pass. The story is compelling: what is the beast? What will happen? And, maybe more importantly, will he ever kiss her? We guess from
the first that she has loved him all along—why else would she remember their first meeting so exactly? At last she hints that she knows what the beast is: what will happen. No, what has already happened. The suspense becomes: will she say what she means? Will he figure it out? She becomes sick. During one of his visits, when she is baffling him by suggesting that she knows something, but won’t say more, she rings for help, and her maid comes in.
“Oh,” said May Bartram.
“Are you in pain?” he asked as the woman went to her. “No,” said May Bartram.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystification. “What then has happened?”
She answers, “What was to.” 20 He sees her once more, and learns nothing else. Then she dies. He—and the reader—want badly to know what she meant. He travels. He returns to her grave, and one day in the cemetery he sees a man ravaged by grief. Then he knows. “The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance—he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.”
He has one further realization. “The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived.” 21 He recognizes that she loved him, but that for him, she was only useful. It’s a compelling, even suspenseful story in which nothing happens except in the characters’ minds and conversations, and at last, a man realizes something. The inner life leads the main character to new understanding. John Marcher, however, is not alone, or not until the moving conclusion; like “The Mark on the Wall” this story has two characters. It’s a love story, though one character refuses to love. Only two other characters appear, but they matter: the maid who instantly, spontaneously, goes to May and puts an arm around her, and the grieving man in the graveyard. James keeps us intent on two people having a lifelong conversation on an absurd
topic. Marcher is a fool; May Bartram’s wisdom, and her clear-eyed choice to make befriending this man the project and occupation of her life, make the reader care, too.
Though John Marcher isn’t the only character in his story, in a more profound sense, he is indeed alone, thinking and eventually realizing. Richard Wright’s book of stories, Eight Men, includes one that’s about the same length as “The Beast in the Jungle”: “The Man Who Lived Underground.” It’s about a man who has been accused of a murder he didn’t commit; he has somehow escaped and at the start of the story is looking for a place to hide. We learn that he is black, and that after he was beaten by three white policemen, he signed a confession. He sees a loose manhole cover, opens it, and climbs down into the sewer. Wright was a friend of Ralph Ellison and surely we are intended to think of Invisible Man, but I also think of “The Beast in the Jungle,” because Wright’s protagonist, whose name is mentioned only once and which the man himself forgets, soon becomes not so much someone trying to outwit the authorities as someone trying to understand himself. He wanders alone through sewers and basements underground, surfacing far enough to look through openings in walls into buildings. He sees a corpse in a funeral home, a church full of people singing: evidences of the life of human beings. He manages to get into basement rooms and steals food; then he watches someone open a safe and is able to return, open it, and take piles of money and jewels, as well as a gun belonging to a sleeping night watchman. He has no interest in the money or jewels now; he pastes the bills on the walls of his cave as wallpaper. Later he returns. The watchman is being accused of the theft, and shoots himself. The underground man feels pity, and the need to act: he climbs out of the sewer and eventually finds the three policemen who beat him up. They have solved the murder and are no longer interested in him, and when he tries to tell them what he actually has done, they assume he is crazy. He persuades them to follow him, leading them to the manhole. But when he begins to descend, instead of following, one policeman shoots him. Another asks why, and the first says
“You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things.” 22 The implication is that the underground man has arrived at a dangerous level of compassion and humanity. In a sense this story has
events, but it quickly moves beyond the hunted man plot, and then everything happens only to affect the thinking of the protagonist, who is powerless above ground but can do anything under the earth. Like the Indian maiden in Wright’s first story, the wise protagonist dies at the end, but along the way his mental life is embodied in the surreal and expressive examples of human life around him. Wright made his story exciting, with cops and guns, death, survival, and more death, but what moves the story forward is the life of the mind.
Katherine Mansfield’s story “Prelude,” based on her childhood in New Zealand, was the second publication of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. It was published in 1918, and so, like Woolf’s and Walser’s stories, it is about the war in some sense, though it takes place many years earlier, in the 1890s.
Nothing much happens in “Prelude,” which is about people with little power. A New Zealand family is moving from a house in town to one a few miles away in the country. The wagon is too full, and the mother, with a slightly hysterical gaiety that alerts the reader to something intense, jokes that two children should be left behind. A neighbor keeps them until they can be brought to the new house. In the course of the day one child wanders over the old, emptied house.
[She] was suddenly quite, quite still, with wide open eyes and knees pressed together. She was frightened. She wanted to call... [her sister] and to go on calling all the while she ran downstairs and out of the house. But IT was just behind her, waiting…23
The children are brought to the new house. Their mother asks “Are those the children?” She is nursing a headache. Mansfield writes, “But Linda did not really care. She did not open her
eyes to see.” 24 In the morning, the mother looks at the clothes in which she traveled and “wished that she was going away from this house too. And she saw herself driving away from them all in a little buggy, driving away from everybody and not even waving.” 25
Are there good and compelling works of literature in which the chief events are in the characters’ minds? If so, what provides forward momentum? Why do we keep reading?
The grandmother and aunt unpack and do whatever else must be done. The children play. The father, who is demanding and grumpy, is driven to his office in a buggy. The children’s aunt
fantasizes about meeting a man. She is “restless, restless.” 26 Cousins visit. The handyman offers to let the children watch him kill a duck for dinner, and they are quite interested when it runs
around without its head, but one child cries, “Put head back! Put head back!” 27
Alice, the cook, “was a mild creature in reality.” But she too has an inner life: she imagines what she thinks of as “the most marvellous retorts”28 to what people say to her, though when we read examples of them, they are quite reasonable, only what she’d say if she were not a servant and could express her opinions truthfully.
Near the end the mother’s feelings become even clearer. Linda has a heart condition and may die at any moment, yet she is pregnant again. She thinks of her husband as a “Newfoundland dog… that I’m so fond of in the daytime.”
It had never been so plain to her as it was at this moment. There were all her feelings for him, sharp and defined, one as true as the other. And there was this other, this hatred, just as real as the rest. She could have done her feelings up in little packets and given them to Stanley. She longed to hand him that last one, for a surprise. She could see his eyes as he opened that…29
This story isn’t about the inner life of one woman, but of several. They are all thinking, all realizing: astonished by their own frightening thoughts. The story has nothing to do with the war that was taking place when it was written, but a sense of risk and doom is everywhere. Death is always a possibility. Sex is assault. Money determines who has power. The piece has no plot that I can discover, but plenty of forward momentum, because we are constantly aware of
what might happen. Mansfield knows how to space the revelations of what people think, so you wonder whether they’ll think something like that again—or worse—and whether they’ll act on what they think, whether the other characters will discover what they think—and what will happen then. It never happens; private thoughts remain private. But like people enduring a public
disaster, such as a war, as we read we don’t have the luxury of knowing that the worst, in fact, won’t happen. We can’t be sure.
My guess is that Andrew Marvell, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Richard Wright, and Robert Walser think that the inner life is the most interesting thing we own. Tillie Olsen and Katherine Mansfield think that ordinary daily life is the most interesting thing, and that the inner life makes it matter. They all go far in proving that it’s possible to make a good story that’s something like “a woman alone in a room realizing something.” The story can be about just one person, even just one person who can have little impact. It can take place in a room, but that doesn’t seem to work as well as if she’s alone in a more complicated place. She can have a lively inner life, and realize something important. But she can’t be alone throughout the story, or at least I can’t find one in which she is alone that truly works. Somebody else must turn up, and maybe several people. Perhaps the inevitable solitude of the inner life—we are all alone inside our heads, all the time—becomes obvious only when someone else shows up, someone who doesn’t know what we’re thinking.
Alice Mattison’s seventh novel, Conscience, appeared in 2018. She is also the author of four collections of stories and The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control— and Live to Tell the Tale. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at Bennington College.
Notes
- Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), p.120.
- Ibid., pp.120–121.
- Katherine Mansfield, “The Tiredness of Rosabel,” in Stories by Katherine Mansfield (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p.6.
- Ibid., p.8.
- Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” in The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p.52.
- Richard Wright, Black Boy, p.4
- Ibid., pp.45–46.
- Ibid., p.157.
- Ibid., p.196.
- Ibid., p.256.
- Tillie Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing,” in Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), p.13.
- Ibid., p. 14.
- Andrew Marvell, ibid., p.52.
- Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1921), p.42.
- Ibid., p.44.
- Ibid., p.46.
- Robert Walser, “The Walk,” translated by Christopher Middleton, in Selected Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), p.103.
- Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (New York: Signet Classics, 1962), p. 411.
- Ibid., p.419.
- Ibid., p.436–437.
- Ibid., pp. 449–450.
- Richard Wright, “The Man Who Lived Underground,” in Eight Men (New York: HarperPerennial, 1940, repr. 2008), p.84.
- Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude,” ibid., p. 56.
- Ibid., p.60.
- Ibid., p.66.
- Ibid., p.80.
- Ibid., p.86.
- Ibid., p.88.
- Ibid., pp.93–94.
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