MILLICENT BELL
41
With practiced skill Oates makes her scenes believable, furnishes her
tale with detaIl and incident, and almost persuades us to accept the reality
of the Mulvaneys. But something seems wrong. Doubt surges into one's
mind about the universal obloquy visited upon a rape victim and her fam–
ily, even in a small American town, so recently as 1976 (the historical locus
of the novel). Could there have still been no awareness of the phenome–
non now called "date rape" - no one among the Mulvaneys' many friends
who failed to draw aside from the victim and her disgraced family? That
she should be so totally rejected by her father seems even more incredible,
though we do understand the injury inflicted upon his masculine pride.
Mulvaney goes too precipitately from stalwart strength to collapse, and
Oates provides no adequate psychic grounding for such unfeeling casting
off. As hard to accept is the acquiescence of Marianne's mother to her
daughter's banishment, her Pollyanna complacency that all is for the best.
Her final status as a figure of unblemished maternity seems unearned.
Barely believable - and hardly as admirable as the author seems to assume
- is poor Marianne, who blames herself for getting raped despite the fact
that her struggles against her attacker are evident to the family doctor.
Religious piety is the mainstay of her humility, though a skeptic may
wonder at the savage internalization of pain represented by such piety.
The writer is entitled to her view of experience, but fiction must con–
tain its own self-cri tical energy or die. Oates denies us the possibili ty of
questioning her premises by the very structure of her novel, which sub–
mits itself to the outward declarations of her characters without irony,
requiring us to accept not only Marianne's Christian forgivingness but
also her mother's creed that life is an inscrutable working-out of the
Divine Will.
In
the unspoken thoughts of this
mater dolorosa
one might
have found the true anguish of a conflict between those female roles
which cleave her either to her husband or to the daughter whom men
have abused. Oates seems to have wanted to avoid as much as possible the
author-character relation available to her as a female writer. She avoids the
female viewpoint by donating a large part of the narrative to Marianne's
youngest brother rather than to ei ther of the women in her tale, though
his maleness places him far from his sister's or mother's consciousness,
incapable of surmising the internal changes that might explain Marianne's
beatification or the older woman's betrayal. His youth also keeps him from
fully understanding his father's deterioration, his brother's transformation
from an ambitious scholar
to
a maddened avenger. So inadequate is he as
a window onto the real life of the Mulvaneys that one is tempted to sus–
pect Oates of a greater literary subtlety than she may have intended - a
covert parodic purpose which exposes the hollowness of sentimentality
and complacency in their fallen world.
