Hera Consciousness: Narrating Strategies in Caroline Gordon's Later Fiction

Abstract

Kathleen Burk Henderson, Ph.D. Hera Consciousness: Narrating Strategies in Caroline Gordon's Later Fiction Introduction Within days of her death, Flannery O'Connor completed her last short story, "Parker's Back," then worried about what Caroline Gordon would think of it. During her first trans-Atlantic Ocean crossing, Katherine Anne Porter typed a thirty-eight page, single spaced letter describing her observations of her fellow passengers .This germ of a story became The Ship ofFools, Porter's only novel. She sent the letter to Caroline Gordon. Walker Percy sent the manuscript of his first novel to Caroline Gordon for her evaluation and advice.When she returned it, along with several pages of "suggestions" on how the novel night be improved, he burned the manuscript and started over. Clearly, there was a time when it was not necessary to ask: "Who is Caroline Gordon?"Yet recent anthologies—of twentieth century American literature, of women's literature, of southern literature —do not contain a single entry by this author of nine novLogos 1:4 1998 Hera Consciousness els, two volumes of short fiction, and other non-fiction works; an author whose reputation for crafting fiction well earned her the title "writer's writer," a master whose teaching on the techniques of fiction were nationally known and had a lasting impact on writers as diverse as Madeline L'Engle and PeterTaylor. What happened? Several things, actually. Not the least of which has been the rise of academic feminism as a major strain in American literary criticism . During the last decade no less than three new biographies of Gordon have been published. There is a fairly high level of interest in her life, the common assessment of which seems to be that she was a victim ofan intelligencia the masculine bias ofwhich doomed her to failure. In this vein, much of the criticism of her fiction, what little there is, seems preoccupied with the victim theme. It seems the more interest there is in her biography, the less there is in her body of work. Also, even before the advent of feminist criticism, there was a widespread critical disavowal of her seriousness as a writer after she converted to Roman Catholicism when she was nearly fifty years old. She apparently fell victim again to the widespread and largely unexamined anti-religious, more specifically, anti-Catholic prejudice in contemporary scholarship. Gordon died in obscurity, in southern Mexico, in 1981. Her novels were mostly out of print; her short fiction known only to southern literature scholars. Perhaps most unfortunate of all, a good deal ofwork, which she envisioned as her last novel, has never been published. Those who had championed the formal naturalism of her early, largely historical fiction, were baffled by the turn toward stream of consciousness and depth psychology her later fiction took. And little effort has been made to understand the scope of her final imaginative vision, evidenced by her last published novel, and several long excerpts of the work in progress which were published before her death. Perhaps this is understandable. Gordon's fiction is not light reading, and it is hard to find. But it offers an irresistible invitation 105 106 Logos to the Catholic intellectual. To give Gordon the credit her life's work deserves, an honest attempt to discern the breadth and scope of her imaginative vision must be made. As what follows will show, this is no easy feat. She had a prodigious mind with a Dantesque intellectual curiosity. She wrote boldly of spiritual themes, yet she deplored the epithet "Catholic novelist." She trampled the sometimes passionately defended boundaries between academic subjects with abandon; she trod on some tender toes. She presented to me a mystery I am still attempting to solve. For I knew this remarkable woman when I was an impressionable young graduate student in the mid-1970s. As a result of this acquaintance , which was not as deep as I might now wish (in addition to being impressionable, I was also thoroughly intimidated by this energetic and irrepressible eighty-something woman), and the acquaintance of others who knew her at the end of her life, I was and remain convinced of at least one...