Literary Visions; 106; Telling Their Tales: Character in Short Fiction

What are you. Funding for this program was provided by the Edinburg CPB project. Licorice was his favorite and I brought him something every day. But he still liked Jennifer better than me. Why me. Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale is the chilling story of an America ruled by a totalitarian regime. Women have lost every

independence the female protagonists offer it says in despair. I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. Then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending to the story and real life will come after it. Well this is just a story and offer it is just a character and imagined person who inhabits the pages. But when characters are compelling enough we immerse ourselves in their story. We can imagine meeting them on the street or maybe crossing the street to avoid them. A reader once wrote to Anton Chekhov about his short story thieves saying it was immoral because checkoff didn't say that horse thieves were evil. Chuckles replied but that has been known for ages without my saying so. It's my job simply to show what sort of people they are. When characters are developed this well it's easy to become engrossed in their story. In fiction the plot moves the story along a conflict must be resolved

but it's the characters who move the plot along and the better we know them and understand their motivations the more we'll believe their story in good characterization. Each detail is intentional adding to the total picture and there are different ways for writers to paint the portraits of their characters. In the great gatsby. Daisy becomes vivid in our minds through one unforgettable characteristic. I look back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low thrilling voice. It was a kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is in the arrangement of notes it will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely. But there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget. A singing compulsion. A whispered listen. A promise that

she had done Gay exciting things just a while since and that there were gay exciting things hovering in the next hour. In everyday use these clothing indicates not only her style but her personality as well. Even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it's Dean. Her feet were always neat looking as if God himself could shape them with a certain style of dress down to the ground in this hot weather. I dressed SOUL OUT IT HURTS MY as they are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun and around the edges on two long pigtails that mild like small lizards disappearing behind her ears. In the barn burning the father single act makes his opinion of the grand house

and its so much stronger than a whole page of dialogue. A lady came up the hall looking not at his father. But at the tracks on the blond rug with an expression of incredulous amazement. Will you please go away she said in a shaking voice. His father stood stiff in the center of the room. The shaggy iron gray brows twitching slightly above the pebble colored eyes as he appeared to examine the house with brief deliberation. Then with the same deliberation he turned to the boy I watched him pivot on the good leg and saw the stiff foot drag round the arc of the turn and leave in a final long and Feiten smear. His father never once looked down at the road. All others have many ways to sketch their characters dialogue behavior

physical traits attire. There's another way to point of view. For instance everyday use is written in first person. The narrator's voice in the story is the mother's. These version of her arrival would be different. If the story were written in third person. That's where the narrator is a character in the story and the writer uses he and she the story might take on a whole different tone more distant more objective. A writer's decision concerning narrative voice isn't simply a choice of pronouns. The same events told from another viewpoint don't make a story better or worse. It makes a new story. Point of view is the perspective of fiction how the events are observed interpreted judged. A wonderful example of this is the Japanese short story in a grove. The basis of the well-known movie Rush. In the ninth century a nobleman and his bride meet another traveler on an

isolated road. They stop in a cedar grove to rest. They're the traveler. A robber rapes the woman. The next day. A wood cutter finds the body of the nobleman but the thief and the woman have vanished. We hear of the nobleman's death from three different viewpoints. First the captured thief. He says that the woman asked that either her husband or the thief die so that her shame would not be known to two men in the resulting dual. The thief killed the nobleman. The second version is the woman's. She says that the robber fled and she herself murdered her husband. Afterwards she tried to kill herself but failed. In the final version the dead husband speaks through media. He denies that he was killed by either his wife or the robber he says he killed himself in despair over his wife's betrayal. This is a story about truth and pride and other themes as well. But it also shows the importance of point of view.

There are three different stories here because each character's version of the truth changes the story. The writer's choice of point of view depends on what the story is to say and through whose eyes those events are best viewed. Tillie Olsen stories are seen through the eyes of ordinary working class people. She gives a voice to the inarticulate in her short story I stand here our evening she shows how much strength and hope there is in the ordinary lives most of us need. I stand here ironing it. What you asked me moves tormented back and forth with I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I'm sure you can help me understand her she's a youngster who needs help and whom I'm deeply interested in helping you think because I am her

mother. I have a key. Or that in some way you could use me as a key. She has lived for 19 years there's all that life that has happened outside of me and beyond me. When and when is the time to remember. I will start and there will be two options. And I will have to gather all together again. And I will become engulfed in all that I did or did not do. With what should have been and what can't be helped. She was well paid. She was a miracle to me. But when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was.

No miracle at all. For I would look for work. And for Emily's father. Who could no longer endure he wrote in his goodbye note sharing one with us. I was 19. It was the pre relieve pre WBA world of the Depression. I would start running as soon as I got of the street car. Running up the stairs. Place smelling sour. In the week. Or sleep to startle awake. When she saw me she would break into a cloud. Anything could not be. Repeated. After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days and

it was better. But it came to where I had to bring her to his family leave. It took time to raise the money for her fare back. Then she got chicken pox and I had to wait longer. When she finally came and hardly knew her. Welcome quick and nervous like a father looking like a father then dressed in a shabby red that yellow her skin and glared at the pockmarks all the baby loveliness going on. The old man living in the back one said in his gentle way. You should smile and only more when you look at her. So what was in my face when I looked at it.

I loved her. They were all the acts of love. It was only with the others I remembered what he said and it was the face of joy not of care or worry. I turned to them to a friendly. You spoke of earlier gift for comedy on the stage. Why does it come from that comedy. There was an animal in her and she came back to me that second time after I had sent her away. She had a new dad you know to learn to love and I think perhaps it was a better time. Tillie Olsen has created the portrait of a mother's anguish as she reflects on some bitter choices concerning her daughter's childhood. But is Mary Poovey of Johns

Hopkins University points out. Emily isn't the only character we learn about. The story is written as a first person narrative so that everything we learn about Emily we learn through the mother. And I would suggest that what we're really learning isn't so much about family as it is about the mother. So that even her descriptions of him really tell us more about the mother than they tell us about Emily and what we say about the mother is that she feels profoundly guilty and a failure as a mother for a whole series of actions that have taken place in the past all since introduction of Flatt characters minor ones who are undeveloped and unchanging. Also helps us learn more about the main characters as Greg Almar of the University of Florida comets of the old man has mentioned who says you ought to smile more. This is an evaluation that we get a sense of the story is told from her point of view. She can't be accountable for how our actions are perceived how the relationship with her daughter might be perceived.

And so by having these five characters they simply come in and make an evaluation motivated by the setting by the situation she happens to be you know what the mother chooses to emphasize is a kind of litany of failures. And it's in the light of those failures that she reads the note from the teacher which actually only says quote She's a youngster who needs help and whom I'm deeply interested in helping him quote. Now if what the teacher is saying is Emily is in trouble then the mother's reading is legitimate. But if what the teacher is saying is this is a girl with enormous talent and I would like to help her then the mother is reading that story that notes through her own failures. Oh and she had physical lightness and brightness twinkling by on skates and bouncing like a ball over the jump rope and skimming over the hill.

But this momentary. The doorbell sometimes rang through her but no one seemed to come in and play in the house or be a best friend. Maybe because we moved so much. There was a boy she loved painfully through to school semesters months later she told me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy candy licorice was his favorite. And I brought him some every day. But he still liked Jennifer better than me. Why me. The kind of question for which there is no answer. I was at the terrible growing years. War years I do not remember them well. I was working there were four smaller ones and there was not time for her. She had to help the mother housekeeper and shop.

There was so little time left and right after the kids were bedded down. She would struggle over books always feeding. It was in those years to develop her enormous appetite that is now legendary in our family. And I would be ironing or writing remail to bill the baby. Sometimes to make me laugh out of the despair she would emitted happenings of types at school. I think I said once. Why don't you do something like this in the school amateur. One day she phoned me at work. Hardly understandable through the weeping. I did. I won I won.

They gave me first prize. They clapped and they clapped and they wouldn't let me go. She began to be asked to perform at other high schools even colleges in that city and state wide affairs. The first one we went to I only recognized to that first moment when an and shy she she almost drowned herself into the curtains. And. Says Anna. Can. Come. Get them to vote then you will allow me. This ballot. Then the roaring stamping on its unwilling to let this.

Rare and precious laugh to. You. Afterwards. I want to do something about a gift like that. I mean you know Martin you know knowing how to swim. Do. We have left it all to her. And the gift has as often eddied inside clogged and clouded as being used. And growing. The story is told only from the mother's point of view Emily's memories of her childhood would be different. A new story.

There are lots of clues already within the story that Emily doesn't perceive her experience as a child in the same way that that the mother does. And. Perhaps that story if it were Emily's would be something like the birth of comedy out of pain might be the story that would be very happy story of what we see of him leave the story is that she's a very successful comedian and she's extremely lively. Even the mother says of her quote she will find her way and quote. So that we see that she's indifferent to school but that indifference to school is compensated for by this facility as a comedian which makes everyone who sees her act not want her to leave the stage. She remembers also and I think this is a crucial part of her character she remembers that in some ways she is the cause of the thing that has been most successful in Emily's life. It was the mother's suggestion that a militia should take her act into the public onto the stage that lay behind him early successes.

As an actress. She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in and why were you so concerned. She will find her way. But I will NEVER total it all. I will never come in to say she was a child so smile that. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was war where I sent her home and to his relatives. There were years she had care she hated. She was a child of anxious not proud love. We were poor and could not afford for the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother. I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up demanding.

She kept too much in herself. Her life was such that she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came tonight. She has much to learn probably little will come of it. She is a child the very edge of the depression of war of fear. Let her be. So all that is in her will not be but in how many does it. There is still enough left to live by only help her to know. So make it so that there is cause for her to know.

That she is more than the stress on the island board helpless before they are. Tillie Olsen writes about people whose circumstances their class or their sex often stifle their ability to express and develop themselves. It was natural for me that I would write the people among whom I grew up with whom I worked on the job in whose neighborhood I live. They were they were my realm just does with other writers. Their place. Is so strong yet this realm which shaped our characters is the same realm which caused her for 20 years to push writing aside.

They had to do with my sex that is being female. Which meant that I was bearing rearing children with aunts and I stand here ironing primary responsibility for their for their wellbeing and world in which they were known. And my class which is which is working class. Also. Someone who is active. And. She has been involved in political union and feminist causes since the 1930s. After settling in San Francisco she found that between those activities and earning a wage to keep her family together. The writing stopped. She says that it is no accident that the first piece she considered publishable began. I stand here arning. Part of it is that I often did write late at night on the ironing board in between the motion of the iron and

there's something meditative about that motion and about the late night hour that is interrupted when the pressures of raising a family eased also and began writing once more. Her collection of short stories tell me a riddle was published in 1961. The title story won the O'Henry Award for The Best American Short story that year. A powerful motive in her writing is to give a voice to those who are silenced because of circumstance. It has to do with human beings with the miracle that all of us really are at birth. And the shaping. That life goes to the American how determining circumstances are circumstances play a big part in her story. I stand here ironing many interpret the story to be about the mothers guilt. Olson says this isn't so.

Of course the mother is not guilty and the reason that it is a healing story is because it was written absolutely without guilt. Or she recognizes that that she was responsible for it but it's a story that recognizes what. The. Society into which one's child must grow into and function what that is responsible for so it's really about another guilt. Part of the power of Olson's writing is her ability to involve and move the reader. As one critic wrote. She portrays the victories of the human spirit not grand in the absolute height achieved but inspiring because of the awesomeness of the forces to the battle. I write from trying to be inside to the people who I am writing about them. The problem really is to afterwards to look and see what do I not need to say because

it's already there on the page and I trust the reader know because they are alive and they know what it is to be themselves. I have had. Experience with other human beings they will fill in what I haven't put there. The characters who stand out in short fiction don't necessarily have to lead dramatic lives. Telly also stories prove that we remember characters because they're relevant to us. We see ourselves or someone we know or we've been given an insight into a very different way of life. Whatever the reason we connect with those characters. So as that mom said that writers can never know enough about their characters the details they choose to tell us can make us believe in the characters and their stories. Literary Beijing's is a production of Maryland Public Television.

Funding for this program was provided by the Adam bird CVB project. For more information on the college town of course video cassettes all fair videotaping and books based on literary visions call 1 800 learn or. Use b.s..