free will and determinism in harriette arnow's "the dollmaker"

South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Free Will and Determinism in Harriette Arnow's "The Dollmaker"Author(s): Kathleen WalshSource: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Nov., 1984), pp. 91-106Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199591 .

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Free Will and Determinism in Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker

KATHLEEN WALSH

THE DOLLMAKER (1954) completes Harriette Arnow's Kentucky trilogy, which also includes Mountain Path (1936) and Hunter' Horn (1949); the novels are linked not only by their sympathetic portrayal of rural Cumberlanders, but also by their concern with characters who feel unable to act freely in a crisis. The Dollmaker is the best known of Arnow's works and the one in which that concern has been the most misunderstood. Joyce Carol Oates has described The Dollmaker as "one of those excellent American works that have yet to be properly assessed, not only as excellent, but as very much American."' Despite a favorable reception and a small body of recent, and generally feminist, criticism, the novel has yet to receive recognition for its imposing and original treatment of a recurring American theme, the necessity of assuming individual freedom and responsibility. The dollmaker, Gertie Nevels, an uprooted Cumberland sharecropper with five children and a weak husband, encounters injustice and misfortune in the squalid industrial suburbs of World War II Detroit. Faced with bleak conditions, Gertie feels alienated, stifled, and, at critical moments, acquiescent. Through complex reference to the Judas legend, Arnow raises the question of whether acquiescence in such circumstances counts as betrayal or victimization. That Amow probes Gertie's failures and her guilt against this backdrop of formidable determining influences accounts for the novel's peculiar force and tension -and may account as well for critical failure to come to terms with its themes.

As a native Kentuckian who moved into a Detroit housing project in 1945, Arnow writes of settings that she knows well and people she views sympathetically. Reviewers of The Dollmaker attested to its powerful depiction of the mean life encountered by these displaced laborers, but tended to limit their treatment to this surface alone, and either admired or disparaged the novel depending on whether they found this subject



Kathleen Walsh

compelling or depressing.2 Later critics of the novel seem motivated by sympathy with Gertie and thus continue this emphasis on the externals which hamper her, presenting her as an oppressed woman and occa-

sionally labelling the novel "naturalistic." One interpreter finds Gertie's

helplessness the central and most admirable fact of the novel: "The excellence of Amow's work, comparable to the best examples of literary naturalism, lies in this portrayal of the barrenness of life and the futility of the human predicament."3 Perhaps The Dollmaker has remained obscure because it has been praised for the wrong reasons: the emphasis on Gertie's misfortunes strips her of the dignity and the interest that come with moral independence. The necessity of assertion despite overwhelming odds is a lesson which Gertie grasps only after great suffering, and then only partially. Readers who stress Gertie's helplessness adopt the character's own limited view of her situation and fail to

appreciate Arnow's complex treatment of an absorbing and sympathetic character immobilized by self-doubt.

It is a measure of the critics' casual treatment of this novel that a

figure which Gertie carves and which she ultimately identifies as Judas is frequently mistaken for Christ. In its association of acquiescence with Judas, The Dollmaker contrasts sharply with a novel with which it

might well have been compared at the time of publication: in 1955, The Dollmaker was in second place to William Faulkner's A Fable for the National Book Award. Unlike Gertie, Faulkner's protagonist is decisive and assertive; his mutiny is treated as an elaborate allegory of the Passion of Christ. Yet V. S. Pritchett criticized Faulkner's use of the Christ motif: "The truly symbolical figure of our time is the traitor or divided man, not the mutineer; it is Judas not Christ."4 Norman Podhoretz found Faulkner's emphasis on mutiny to be untimely, describing the emerging generation as "not lost' but patient, acquiescent, careful rather than reckless, submissive rather than rebellious."3 Such testimony to the timeliness of its concerns makes all the more

puzzling the failure of The Dollmakers reviewers to notice its concentration on betrayal.and passivity. Certainly this underappreciated novel deserves the sort of reassessment that must finally be based, not only on its forceful drama, but on a fuller understanding of its themes.

Those who read The Dollmaker as a social indictment tend to exag-

gerate its contrast between Gertie's life in Kentucky and her trials in Detroit-without noting that Gertie acquiesces in her uprooting. In

Kentucky, the Nevelses are poor tenant farmers, and Gertie is shown to have remarkable stamina, determination, and competence for such a life. In fact, the novel opens with an arresting scene in which she

performs a rude tracheotomy on her choking child while a horrified

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South Atlantic Review

Army general looks on. Gertie runs the farm while her husband, Clovis, does odd jobs and dreams of moving to the city. Unlike Clovis, Gertie is in her element: the physical labor and the closeness to the earth and to the seasons satisfy her. She yearns for her own land and when she receives a small legacy which will enable her to buy the old Tipton Place, she plans to carve a "laughing Christ" in celebration. But along with this emphasis on Gertie's strength and decency, Arnow makes clear Gertie's habits of self-doubt; these will result in her capitulation when she is pressured to forego the purchase of the Tipton Place and move to Detroit.

Gertie tends to be uncommunicative and, in critical ways, indirect. She keeps her plans for the Tipton Place secret, fearing that if Clovis knew of her savings, he would use the money for a truck. She waits to make her purchase until Clovis leaves to join the Army. This subter- fuge breeds guilt and deprives her of whatever chance she might have to enlist Clovis' support. Both the silence and the guilt are patterns of response derived from Gertie's relationship to her mother, a whining and self-satisfied woman who is proud of being in poor health and of being "saved." Mrs. Kendrick has long been disappointed in her strapping daughter's failure to share her fraility and her convictions. Gertie's resistance to her mother's fundamentalist religion results in inner turmoil: she is anguished by her mother's easy weeping and her disapproval, but her own forgiving nature leads her to reject the hell- fire preaching of the hill evangelists. Gertie concentrates in her Bible reading on what she finds a more hopeful doctrine, that of the blessedness of Christian meekness. Frequent choices are Amos, who preached God's care for the poor, and Ecclesiastes, counseling submis- sion to God's design and elevating the patient over the "proud in spirit."

That Gertie's submissiveness is tinged by her mother's fatalistic Calvinism is evident in her private legend of Judas, a figure who troubles, even obsesses, her. For Gertie, Judas' betrayal is clouded by the issue of foreordination; she wonders, "Did Judas ever ask, 'Some- body has to sin to fulfill the prophecy, but why me?' 6 She feels pity and even admiration forJudas' futile repentance, and early states her desire to carve an image of Judas which would feature that moment: "Not Judas with his mouth all drooly, his hand held out fer th silver, but Judas given th thirty pieces away. I figger . . . they's many a one does meanness fer money-like Judas. . . . But they's not many like him gives th money away an feels sorry onct they've got it" (p. 23). Although she pities Judas, she does not entirely absolve him, and her recurring sense of identification with him is a measure of her feelings of guilt. Her religious conflict with her mother is expressed in "sweaty-handed

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guilt and misery" and leads her to question, "Was she like Judas, foreordained to sin?" (p. 69). Gertie chooses meekness, but she shifts between the light and the dark rationalizations for that choice.

Gertie's sense of powerlessness and her fear of being in the wrong are manifest in the meekness with which she accepts the loss of the Tipton Place. When Clovis leaves for the Army, she works cheerfully and

strenuously to effect the purchase and resettle her family. Refused for enlistment, Clovis goes to Detroit instead, lured by high wages and

store-bought happiness. However, her mother's hysteria-and not Clovis' summons-influences Gertie to join him. Before Clovis sends for the family, Gertie's mother comes weeping and citing Scripture: "Leave all else an cleave to thy husband" (p. 141). Gertie listens, head bowed, pulling the joints of her hands as she typically does when downcast before her mother. Without argument, Gertie bows to her loss: "It came to her that maybe she had always known those other trees would never be her own . . . just as she had always known that Christ would never come out of the cherry wood" (p. 145). Given the owner's reluctance to sell the property over Mrs. Kendrick's opposition, given the desire of the children to be with their father, and given Clovis' limited vision, it is not certain that Gertie would have prevailed had she held to her purpose. But she did not even test those limits, and she soon looks back to term herself a "coward": "If she could have stood up to her mother and God and Clovis and Old John, she'd have been in her own house this night" (pp. 148-49). This, of course, somewhat begs the

question, since one may not effectively be able to "stand up" to God; typically, Gertie feels both guilty and helpless.

Gertie soon experiences the disastrous consequences of her com-

pliance with the removal of her family to a place where she can no

longer keep them safe. The break in the narrative following her

capitulation emphasizes her reversal of fortune; as the next chapter opens, Gertie and the five children are cramped into a train heading for

Detroit, and the contrast with the previous scenes of purposeful work in the outdoors is sharp. It is an uncomfortable journey toward increasing discomfort.7 Physical unease, loss of privacy, and a sense of alienation become regular features of Gertie's life in the family's squalid quarters in "Merry Hill." Here, Gertie's strengths and skills have no outlet, and the family is no longer self-sufficient; they buy on credit, and she buys badly. Her loss of status and purpose brings "sass" from the children and increasing criticism from Clovis.

Gertie is not alone in her misery. Detroit "ain't no place for people"

(p. 159); the industrial workers and their families are literally as well as

figuratively mangled by the machines and systems they encounter. The

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overcrowded and underequipped schools teach little besides "adjustment." Consumerism is another engine of conformity; even the children become willing adherents of a system which requires that these bewildered newcomers spend more than they have on shoddy goods they do not need. And the casualties in the factories seem to equal those of the war which has caused the industrial buildup: "Gertie had never known there were so many ways for a workingman to die: burned, crushed, skinned alive, smothered, gassed, electrocuted, chopped to bits, blown to pieces" (p. 318). The odds are clearly against these poor and inexperienced migrants who hope to wrest a new and better life from the city. Joyce Carol Oates, discussing the novel's depiction of Detroit, asks, "How can the human imagination resist a violent assimilation into such a culture?"8 Gertie questions the meaning of free will in such a setting in simpler terms: "Free will, free will; only your own place on your own land brought free will" (p. 319).

Arnow challenges us to consider whether Gertie-or anyone-can be blamed for failure in such a setting. A self-contained episode which precedes Gertie's series of crises crystallizes the question of exoneration and can be seen as a demonstration of how to read The Dollmaker. While walking in the alley, Gertie encounters a lone, elderly, poorly-dressed woman who has come to pass out Bible leaflets. Kathy Daly, the overwrought wife of the neighborhood's Irish Catholic bigot, attacks the "gospel woman," first dousing her with "Roman Cleanser" and then striking her with a broom. Gertie steps in to hold the broom while the gospel woman escapes. Overpowered, Mrs. Daly attacks Gertie with a string of shrill curses. Gertie's compassion is aroused by Mrs. Daly's worn and weary appearance and, apparently, by the extremity of her fury: "The angry, troubled eyes made her want to say something, beg forgiveness for doing a thing she had to do" (p. 225). Gertie feels responsible for the scene, as if she had provoked Mrs. Daly's fury by preventing her violence. Soon after her own escape, Gertie contemplates her wood carving and remembers the laughing Christ that she once hoped to carve, but this angry scene disturbs that vision for her: "The only face she could see now was Kathy Daly's, the eyes looking at her with such hatred. A sin it was to make another sin with such hatred and such talk, but Judas had to sin" (p. 226). Apparently, Gertie feels that she has sinned by preventing further abuse, and elliptically, she also questions whether God was just to require Judas to betray. Gertie blames herself and perhaps the gospel woman as well, but she does not blame Mrs. Daly. The sinner, or the "Judas," to use Gertie's term, has been transformed into a figure of suffering, a Christ figure.

Certainly Gertie's compassion under fire is admirable, but whether

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such compassion is the whole point of the episode should be consid- ered. The episode does provide some corroboration for Gertie's reversal-or confusion-of the roles of arch-betrayer and arch-victim. De-

spite her poor clothing, the gospel woman, "Mrs. Bales," is only a brief visitor in the alley and is soon collected by her maid and a chauffeur. That this brief visitor goes home to safety and ease while those visited are condemned to squalor for all the time they know highlights human

suffering and the unfairness of the human predicament. However, if on one level the episode invites us to consider the pained predicament of

erring mortals, on a deeper level it suggests the inadequacy of any refusal based on such considerations to judge human error. Arnow's

many-layered parable may at first appear to shift blame from Judas to

Christ, but this appearance dissolves when one considers the convinc-

ing sympathy and wisdom displayed by the gospel woman during her brief visit. Indeed, the gospel according to Mrs. Bales counsels assertion despite the difficulties of one's predicament. Her message is one of love but not meekness, forgiveness but not acquiescence. She advises a

young woman who is consumed by resentment toward her husband to "be certain" of what she feels and to take decisive action once she knows. Taken as a whole, the episode suggests that the human condition is

difficult, but we are not helpless; that suffering humans are deserving of sympathy and forgiveness, but are not blameless.

Gertie undergoes three major crises of conscience in Detroit, and in each case the complexity of daily life so overshadows the crisis as it unfolds that one can easily sympathize with her errors. Her suffering is also sharply drawn; the threnody this becomes may account for those

readings of the novel which stress Gertie's helplessness. But in each

event, Gertie is clearly seen to stifle an impulse which would have been more supportive, or more effective, or at all events more honest than the

course which she adopts, and her anguished identification with Judas following each crisis reflects her stricken conscience. By detailing the

difficult and unclear circumstances in which Gertie makes her deci-

sions, Arnow implies that there are significant differences between

Gertie's failure and Judas' far more clear-cut betrayal. But despite her

obvious sympathy with the character, Arnow writes a tale not only of

bad luck, but of bad judgment, judgment clouded by dejection and

passivity. The reader who exonerates Gertie because of her adversities

looks at Gertie in the way Gertie looked at Kathy Daly. The first of Gertie's crises involves twelve-year-old Reuben, who is

sullen and withdrawn as he struggles to maintain his individuality- the outlook, skills, and interests fostered in the Cumberland-against the forces of conformity he encounters in Detroit. That Gertie recog-

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nizes his dilemma is clear, but she is uncertain of the right course. She does criticize Reuben's contemptuous teacher for her treatment of him: "But he cain't hep the way he's made. It's a lot more trouble to roll out steel - an make it like you want it - than it is biscuit dough" (p. 335). But when Reuben is then mocked by teacher and classmates for his mother's outburst, Clovis blames Gertie for the boy's difficulty in "adjusting": "You've got to git it into yer head that it's you that's as much wrong with Reuben as anything" (p. 339). Her confidence shaken by her failure with the teacher, Gertie elects to urge conformity, but she is clearly in conflict as she counsels the troubled boy. She tells him, "Honey, try harder to be like the rest," and stifles her impulse to defiance: "She choked--she was no rabbit to beget rabbits" (pp. 340- 41). Reuben now feels totally isolated, alienated, and threatened; the next day he runs away, back to Kentucky and to harsh servitude to his grandmother.

Whether or not Reuben's estrangement and flight might have been prevented, Gertie is dissatisfied with the role she has played and again her thoughts turn to Judas, suggesting both her stricken conscience and her sense of helplessness. Waiting for news of her missing son, Gertie turns to the Bible, first to read, "Why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing." But quickly dismissing the passage condemning the prodigal, she reads and then re-reads compulsively (note Arow's ellipses) Matthew's account of the repentance of Judas: "I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent blood

. .What is that to us? . .. And he cast down the pieces of silver . and he went away and hanged himself' (p. 361). Putting aside her Bible, she gives a "tortured, furrowed" face to a crucifix she has been carving, again identifying betrayal with victimization. Yet though Gertie takes responsibility for the failure with Reuben, she does not clearly perceive the nature of her error: "Still, she knew that most of the trouble with Reuben was herself--her never kept promises, her slow- ness to hide her hatred of Detroit" (p. 369). Perhaps since she does not fully recognize her failure to defend his individuality, the pattern of well-intentioned stifling of her own impulses is repeated in the ultimate tragedy of the novel.

The death of six-year-old Cassie, the personable and imaginative child most like Gertie and therefore dearest to her, is a searing loss. As the crisis unfolds, Gertie's dilemma is again whether to defend her child's individuality or to encourage adjustment. Although two of the Nevels children have been assimilated fully and quickly, Cassie, like Reuben, "seemed always a child away from home" (p. 210). She finds solace in her imaginary friend, Callie Lou, alternately witch child and

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Kathleen Walsh

old woman, around whom she spins elaborate tales and with whom she shares confidences.9 Callie Lou was tolerated in Kentucky, but this

setting requires greater conformity. Complaints about Cassie's "talking to herself' mount after Reuben runs away, particularly from Clovis, who berates Gertie: "You've got to make her quit them foolish runnen an talken-to-herself fits. Th other youngens'ull git to thinken she's

quair, an you'll have another Reuben" (p. 367). Gertie, guilty over Reuben, decides to do as Clovis demands, thinking, "Happiness in the

alley with the other children was better for Cassie than fun with Callie Lou" (p. 368).

That this will be a loss for the child she also recognizes: "Giving up, giving up; now Cassie had to do it" (p. 379), and she is clearly in conflict as she denies Cassie the Callie Lou who has long been a bond between them. She tells Cassie, "there ain't no Callie Lou," but is

"fighting down a great hunger to seize and kiss the child and cry: 'Keep her, Cassie, Keep Callie Lou. A body's got to have somethen all their own'" (p. 379). Gertie's attempt to force adjustment pushes the child

away from her into a dangerous world. Cassie retreats with Callie Lou into "the little island of safety between the big alley and the railroad fence" (p. 386). The child is clearly troubled and catastrophe looms, but Gertie continues to distrust those impulses which we later find would have averted the tragedy. When Gertie finally realizes that the

alley children have accepted Callie Lou and include her in their games, she decides, "All this business of doing away with Callie Lou had been a mistake." She hunts Cassie, imagining the joyful dialogue she will have with her: "Lady, lady, bring that black-headed child in out a this raw cold" (p. 401). But it is too late for reversal when Gertie spots Cassie; she has crept through a small hole in the fence and is huddled on the railroad tracks, apparently sheltering Callie Lou from an oncoming train. Cassie's legs are severed by the train, and the tragedy culminates

pitilessly in the child's pain and the mother's grieving futile efforts to undo it all. Certainly circumstances have been stacked against Gertie and much does seem left to chance, from the ill-timed appearance of

the hole in the fence to the airplane which drowns Gertie's warning cries. Yet though the scene is crowded with bad fortune, it is clear that Gertie had an option. Her guilt over her failure to exercise that option in time is the focus of the final third of the novel.

After Cassie's death, Gertie comes close to losing herself in grief, unable to stop reliving "the losing battles--all the battles: to have the

land, to make Reuben happy, to reach Cassie, and the last big battle-

to hold the blood" (p. 417). But it is not simply the sense of loss which

makes this grief unbearable to her; it is "the anger, the hatred for herself

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who had caused it all" (p. 417). After this tragedy, Gertie is more fully aware of the nature of her error than she was in her guilt over Reuben. Almost immediately after Cassie's death, Gertie attempts to rational- ize: "I didn't aim it that away ... I didn't send her off to be killed. I didn't aim to kill her when Mom made me come. It was Mom an-." But beneath this hysterical-and uncharacteristic-evasion is the un- spoken recognition that despite her mother's interference, Gertie bears the blame for her acquiescence: "No, not her mother, herself, herself only she couldn't say it. She ought to have stood up to them all" (pp. 421-23). The idea that one bears responsibility for going along with another's bullying, that unfought weakness may be as disastrous as unmoderated force, is later expressed by Gertie to a neighbor, Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Anderson has contempt for her husband, Homer, who marshalls his wife to play a part in impressing his bosses, and she complains of him to Gertie, "he never sold his birthright - he thinks he found it. But he stole mine." Gertie responds, "'I guess,' she said, speaking with difficulty, thinking of the Tipton Place with Cassie, 'we all sell our own - but allus it's easier to say somebody stole it'" (p. 440).

If the novel ended with this recognition of the importance of assertion, Arnow's statement of individual responsibility would be far more direct- and simpler--than in fact it is. But the issue is extended through Gertie's carving of the wooden man, and through yet another troubling act of passivity. Clovis becomes involved in the seamier side of union politics, and after he is hurt in a fight, his anger draws him toward violent revenge. After the fight, Gertie grimly does what Clovis requires of her to cover up his participation, telling lies to the children and the neighbors. As Clovis' behavior becomes more suspicious, Gertie struggles to keep from having her suspicions confirmed, and tries instead to blame herself for her uneasiness: "There wasn't anything except her own wicked imagination" (p. 562). When the circum- stantial evidence that Clovis has murdered the man he sought is strong, Gertie is pulled two ways: wanting to know and to deny what she knows. She runs water over her whittling knife after Clovis uses and returns it, but she argues herself out of seeing what she sees: "Some red rust maybe . . . The knife had gone deeply; some blood had got into the handle. No, no, it wasn't blood, man's blood on her knife. She turned the water on full force; it frothed and bubbled white in the basin, pure white; there was no stain -no stain at all" (p. 568). Gertie can no longer achieve self-suppression without a struggle.

And though she does keep quiet, Gertie is conscious of the struggle. She feels herself to be sinning and identifies with Judas, thinking, "What had Judas done for his money? Whispered a little, kept still as

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she did now" (p. 564). After the murder, Gertie can no longer hide her error from herself: "she heard her moans, her words, like from another's mouth; her tongue ashamed, too ashamed to use her own speech, but crying in the words of the alley, 'I stood still fer it- I kept shut - I could ha spoke up'" (p. 584). Gertie has repeatedly recognized her error of

passivity and yet has continued to err in that way. The strength and

significance of this last confession must be assessed not only in light of Gertie's previous failures, but in light of the somewhat destructive, somewhat assertive action which concludes the novel.

Immediately following the death of Cassie, Gertie turns to the

partially-carved block of wood; the carving of it, though often inter-

rupted by the family's increasing financial difficulties, dominates the final third of the novel. The wooden figure embodies Gertie's conflicts and doubts but remains tantalizingly incomplete when she destroys it in an enigmatic ending which is not so much a resolution as a release from the tensions which the figure embodies.

Gertie's carving is primarily motivated by her need to resolve these tensions. Glenda Hobbs argues for another view, that the drive for artistic self-expression in the usual sense impels Gertie to carve. Hobbs

interprets The Dollmaker in light of Tillie Olsen's Silences, seeing the novel as a dramatization of"the frequently skirted conflict between a mother's

attempt to be both true to her art and watchful of her children's welfare and happiness."? In Hobbs' view, Gertie's central conflict is that she is "torn between her cherry-wood Christ and her children" (p. 862). However, Gertie's obsessive involvement with the wooden figure comes after Cassie's death. Before that, there is no time when the desire to carve can be seen to hinder her attempt to be "watchful of her children's welfare." She is never too busy with her carving to meet Reuben's or Cassie's needs, she is simply too uncertain of herself. If the wooden

figure does not distract her from the children, neither do the children

pull her from the wood until the novel's concluding chapters. During the early months in Detroit, that is, during the period when her

tragedy occurs, Gertie often finds time on her hands while the children are at school or at play. She is revealingly contrasted with Mrs.

Anderson, who complains that as wife and mother she cannot pursue her painting. Mrs. Anderson is shamed by what Gertie accomplishes in wood - while Gertie has been relieving her of the distasteful job of

laundering Homer Anderson's shirts. Arnow depicts Mrs. Anderson as a self-pitying, neurotic woman whose regrets for her lost art deserve little sympathy.

Though Hobbs finds Gertie in "the predicament of a woman who

confronts the problem [art vs. motherhood] rather than evades it, and

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who is determined to have it both ways" (p. 854), Gertie never seems conscious of herself as an artist. The quality of her work is suggested by admiring viewers, but she characterizes her carving as "whittlen foolishness." If this is self-deprecation, it cuts deeply enough so that she makes little resistance to the mechanization of her carving through Clovis' introduction of a jig saw. His aim is to mass-produce the dolls which Gertie has occasionally carved for cash. Although she dislikes the ugliness and cheapness of the painted dolls and cringes at hawking them as "genuine hand-made dolls," she readily takes up the scheme as the surest means of income with Clovis out of work. Hobbs perhaps rightly applies to Arnow's own life Tillie Olsen's discussion of the conflict between motherhood and concentrated attention to art. But in The Dollmaker, Arnow's consciousness of such a conflict seems muted; in fact, Arnow has written, "Gertie was no artist."" Gertie's choice of her family as her top priority is so consistent and unlabored as to admit no conflict. We must interpret the wooden figure within the context of Gertie's felt needs and Gertie's priorities. Within that context, the carving is an outlet not so much for Gertie's imagination as for her guilt; it gains prominence as the means by which this reserved and confused woman examines her failure to protect her family. Through the carving, Arnow reveals the issues with which Gertie must come to terms in this examination.

Because the carving reflects contradictory impulses and because it is never finished, its identity is uncertain. Yet the carving has rather freely been termed a "figure of Christ,"12 an assertion that gives Gertie's whittling a more pious - and more straightforward - significance than in fact it has. The carving is never identified as Christ in the novel. Generally it is "the block of wood," sometimes "the faceless man" or "the man in the wood." Gertie is consistently in doubt about the final image, as if it is something that she will find rather than create. In the novel's opening scene, Gertie declares her uncertainty as to whether she will carve Christ orJudas. Later, when the wood arrives in Detroit, Gertie is asked if it is to be Christ and replies, "I've allus kind a hoped so" (p. 226). In the novel's final scene, she is asked if the figure is Christ and shakes her head and answers, "Cherry wood" (p. 598). The careless assertion that the faceless figure is Christ rests on the attribution to Gertie of a much greater degree of religious conviction than Arnow shows her to possess. Gertie's vision of a "laughing Christ" collapses with the loss of the Tipton Place; she continues to search in her Bible, but with little satisfaction. Soon after arriving in Detroit, she tells the gospel woman: "I've been a readen th Bible an a hunten God for a long while - off an on - but it ain't so easy as picken up a nickel off th floor"

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(p. 221). Later, after Cassie's death, Gertie encounters a Bible sales- man asking, "Lady, what must we do to be saved through Christ?" Automatically, "She answered, reaching for a lump of coal, 'Believe."' But immediately she despairs, "But what if a body cain't believe?"

(p. 518). Gertie's despair- and her anger- prevent her from carving Christ.

Gertie's old enigma as to whether one who gives in is victim or

betrayer lingers in her hesitation over the identity of the figure and causes her to resist declaring her subject to be Judas either. However, her carving comes to look more and more like Judas, captured at that moment which has long fascinated her-Judas contemplating repentance. Much of her work is on the hands, one empty and one holding an undefined substance. The attitude of the hands prompts observers to

question, "Wot's he gonna do?" (p. 482); "Will he keep it?" (p. 511). The feeling is not simply remorse; hesitation is palpable. While Gertie whittles, an array of biblical characters with something to hold on to occurs to her in reference to the hands: "Jonah with a withered leaf from the gourd vine - Esau his birthright - Lot's wife looking at some little pretty piece of house plunder she could not carry with her-Job listening to the words of Bildad and wondering what next the Lord would want" (p. 444). That moment of decision between keeping and

giving is the key to the dilemma Gertie projects onto the figure. The hands reflect her divided mind: her habitual, giving impulses toward

accomodation, acceptance, and atonement are countered by her guilt and anger for having given too much.

The carving is an incarnation of Gertie's regret, regret that bites in at least two senses. There is the sense of loss and longing, and at this level the figure is Gertie's link to her past, the wood a tactile remnant of

Kentucky and also a reminder of Cassie, who prized the figure and connected it to Callie Lou. The hands express the wish to keep that which is already lost. Secondly, the wooden figure expresses Gertie's

regret over her role in that loss; the concentration on "a hand cupped, loosely holding . . the thing, hard won, maybe as silver by Judas, but now to give away" reveals her desire for expiation. But there is conflict in such giving. Glimpsing the face as she contemplates that cupped hand, she thinks, "the eyes were sad or maybe angry with the loss"

(p. 464). Her remorse prompts a giving posture, but that impulse is

paradoxically restrained by a growing recognition that no further

giving can gain her what she wants. In fact, she lost it by giving. These conflicts are arrested - if not resolved - at a critical moment in

Gertie's final crisis, and from that moment she seems rather grimly free from doubt about the figure. Struggling against her knowledge that

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Clovis has murdered a man, Gertie escapes to the wood, seeking for the last time a being who will absolve her: ". .. she had only to pull the curtain of wood away, and the eyes would look down at her. They would hold no quarreling, no scolding, no questions. Even long ago, when only the top of the head was out of the wood, below it had seemed a being who understood the dancing, the never joining the church, had been less sinful than the pretending that she believed and-" (p. 584). At this point, the passage breaks off into her pained confession of pretense, "I kept shut-I could ha spoke up." Gertie appears to recognize that atonement has been a poor substitute for action. Almost immediately following this secret confession, Mrs. Anderson appears and confidently assesses Gertie's carving: "he won't keep still and hold it. He'll give it back." Gertie's response reveals a new awareness of the necessity of following the right impulse at the right moment: "'A body cain't allus give back . . . things,' Gertie said, filled suddenly with a tired despair." She concludes with an identification which she never retracts: "The wood was Judas after all" (p.585). Gertie's pained recognition that her mistakes cannot be rectified through regret,'3 that repentance does not make Judas a Christ, forces her to confront the present.

Her new awareness-or disillusionment-is soon demonstrated. Gertie has been steadily awakening to the needs of what family she has left. Clovis is indefinitely unemployed, money can be made by ma- chine-producing dolls, and wood is needed to make them. That same evening, Gertie turns obsessively to the wooden figure, working dumbly through the night "as if time were running out and this were the one thing she must do with her time" (p. 595). In the morning, as if in extension of the same drive, she hauls the still faceless carving to a scrapwood lot where she asks that it be sawed into small boards. When Gertie learns that she must split the wood for the saw, she hesitates but does not reconsider. After several blows, the wood splits open as if it were a living thing: "The wood . . . came apart with a crying, rendering sound . . . then slowly the face fell forward to the ground, but stopped, trembling and swaying, held up by the two hands" (p. 599). This pathetic collapse is met by "a great shout" from the watching children, echoing an earlier passage depicting Gertie in Kentucky in all her strength, splitting firewood while her children "gave cries of encouragement, and always shouts of joy as each chunk came apart" (p. 89). These shouts may be a tribute to Gertie's new firmness, but the sense of loss is also strong.

Gertie's final action is an equivocal one and is described in terms which deepen the ambiguity. She has turned toward the importunities

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Kathleen Walsh

of the present, away from the link with the past which the carving provided, but in the past, irrevocably in the past, lie the components of her happiness. She has finally substituted decisive and responsible action for contemplation of what the unalterable limits to action might be-or might have been-but the action she chooses is at some level destructive, even self-destructive, and arises in a climate of moral defeat. Arnow has not chosen to resolve the problem of the obstructed will through its exertion; instead, she presents the problem fully. At the novel's end, the issue of assertion is felt as complex, perplexing, and

pressing. If Arnow's subject is self-reliance, her argument for it is more

guarded than that made by its great American spokesman. In "Self- Reliance," Emerson claims to have easily dismissed such a dilemma as Gertie's when he was "quite young": "if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."14 Gertie's confidence is never so strong. That her final action cannot be felt as a heroic triumph of the will is of a piece with the repetition of her error: Arnow's subject is not simply the

importance of self-reliance but the difficulty of maintaining it. A heroic

triumph would suggest that assertion of the will is relatively easy once the necessity is recognized. But Arow never relaxes the tension between responsibility and inability; she suggests that circumstance will continue to pressure and perplex and that the desire to accomodate will likewise continue. Resolve must be strong and clear indeed if it is to have timely expression.

Though Arnow's vision of the power of the will to counteract the

crushing weight of adversity is not optimistic, her power lies in

revealing-not the exterior forces which oppose the individual--but the interior monitors which inhibit. The subject of betrayal was timely in the 1950's when various prominent figures were publicly pressured to

betray by speaking up and naming names. However, Arnow treats a

type of betrayal which is far more insidious, hence far more common,

betrayal not of commission but of omission, not of self-interest but of self-doubt. We are frequently asked to overlook or even support some minor transgression--as when a coworker cheats on petty cash or a friend cuffs his child- and we acquiesce, we keep shut, because we are not sure of what we saw, or of whether we're right, or of whether

speaking up will make any difference. One carries away from The Dollmaker a sense of the awful cost of such passivity.

Readings which assert the work's "naturalism" perhaps arise from the understandable temptation to explain away Gertie's errors out of admiration and compassion for this remarkable and hard-pressed woman. Arow never depicts Gertie as so far debased that we are free

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from the pull of her strengths. Gertie remains unselfish, actively compassionate, and competent in providing for her family; indeed, she is their mainstay in the end as she was in the beginning. Arnow writes that she rejected "Dissolution" as a possible title for the novel: "A combination of war and technology had destroyed a system of life, but the people were not all destroyed to the point of dissolution."'5 Although Gertie does not triumph, she retains our sympathy throughout, evok- ing not simply pity, but a measure of admiration. However, Gertie is admirable for something other than her victimization; Arnow would surely concur with W H. Auden's objection to the presentation, "in novel after novel," of "heroes whose sole moral virtue is a stoic endur- ance of pain and disaster."16 Gertie's acquiescence in her victimization is the trait by which her heroic qualities are reduced, betrayed.

College of William and Mary

NOTES

'Joyce Carol Oates, "The Nightmare of Naturalism: Harriette Arnow's The Dollma- ker," in New Heaven, New Earth (New York: Vanguard, 1974), p. 110.

2See, for example, rev. of The Dollmaker, The New Yorker, 1 May 1954, p. 119: "It remains a depressing picture of human defeat and bewilderment." Also, Walter Havighurst, "Hillbilly D.P's," Saturday Review, 24 April 1954, p. 12: "This long, somber, and moving novel shows Gertie Nevels struggling to save her family from a sordid and grasping world." Also Harriett T. Kane, "The Transplanted Folk," New York Times Book Review, 25 April 1954, p. 4: "It is hard to believe that anyone who opens its pages will soon forget the big woman and her sufferings."

'Barbara Rigney, "Feminine Heroism in Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker," Frontiers. A Journal of Women's Studies, 1 (1975), 85. Barbara Baer, "Harriette Arow's Chronicles of Destruction," The Nation, 31 January 1976, p. 118, also discusses Amow's "naturalistic outlook." Joyce Carol Oates argues that "The beauty of The Dollmaker is its author's absolute commitment to a vision of life as cyclical tragedy-as constant struggle" (p. 102), but Oates finally withholds the label of naturalism because "a total world is suggested but not expressed" (p. 110). Frances Malpezzi, "Silence and Captivity in Babylon: Harriette Amow's The Dollmaker," Southern Studies, 20(1981), 90, presents Gertie's oppression in feminist rather than cosmic terms: "Gertie is every woman who has had to deny herself, her desires, her talents, for the sake of family."

4V. S. Pritchett, "Time Frozen: A Fable," Partisan Review, 21 (1954), 558. 5Norman Podhoretz, "William Faulkner and the Problem of War: His Fable of

Faith," Commentary, September, 1954, pp. 227-32; rpt. in Faulkner. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966), p. 250.

6TheDollmaker(New York: Avon, 1972), p. 51. Subsequent references to this edition are given in the text.

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7This journey has been described as an archetypal descent into hell. See Dorothy H. Lee, "Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker: AJourney to Awareness," Critique. Studies in Modern Fiction, 20 (1978), 92-98.

8Oates, p. 101. 'The resemblance between Cassie's imaginative outlet in Callie Lou and Gertie's

own in her carving has been noted. See Glenda Hobbs, "A Portrait of the Artist as Mother: Harriette Arnow and The Dollmaker," Georgia Review, 33 (1979), 851-66.

'OHobbs, p. 854. 'Letter in response to Barbara Rigney's "Feminine Heroism in Harriette Arnow's

The Dollmaker," Frontiers, 1 (1976), 147.

'2See, for example, Baer, p. 118: "She is constantly carving a figure of Christ, whose face, emerging and receding from a great block of cherry wood, is the central

image of the novel." Also Wilton Eckley, Harriette Arnow (New York: Twayne, 1974), p. 86: "Her biggest project is the carving of a figure of Christ." Also Lee, p. 97: "The hidden face in the wood is that of Christ."

'1Remarking on this scene, Glenda Hobbs reports Amow's comment to her that Gertie is "unluckier even than the arch betrayer; he could give back the silver . .. but Gertie couldn't give back Callie Lou" (pp. 859-60).

'4The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks A.

Atkinson (New York: Modem Library, 1950), p. 148. ')Harriette Simpson Arnow, Introduction, Mountain Path (Berea, Kentucky: Coun-

cil of the Southern Mountains, 1963). '""Henry James and the Artist in America," Harper's Magazine, July, 1948, p. 37.

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free will and determinism in harriette arnow's "the dollmaker"

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